Asolo, the Creative Work of Memory

Abstract

When in 1991 Countess Maria Fossi Todorow, the great granddaughter of Katharine deKay Bronson, made La Mura, the residence in Asolo, Italy, where Robert Browning spent two months of 1889, his last year, available to Robert Browning scholars and enthusiasts, it rekindled in them an interest in the tiny hilltop town that was the setting of Sordello and Pippa Passes and the place where the poet completed, proofed for the press and returned to his publisher, George Smith, his final collection Asolando. Now, to be able to climb the winding road to the city gate; walk the narrow streets of the walled medieval town — only slightly changed since Browning’s residence there; actually live in the quarters that the poet sometimes occupied; look down the Veneto plains and up toward the Alps from the Loggia of La Mura, built especially for him by Bronson; survey the remains of Queen Cornaro’s castle; visit La Rocca, the fortress on the highest point of the hill; view the silk factory where Pippa worked; and enter the Cathedral, the center point of the town, is to bring before us again the wonders of Browning’s early Italian obsession and his volumes Sordello, Pippa Passes and Asolando. That his poetic career should have ended with a residence in this ancient town, the place of his early poetic inspiration, is the supreme and marvelous coincidence of his remarkable career. Browning’s experience with the city — so overwhelming, so indelible — haunted him a near-lifetime: it became a repeated inspiration to him in his early years; its influence faded briefly at mid-career, then it was rekindled in his final year and became, as for his early works, the source and inspiration for his last collection.