Abstract: When the echo of the romantic recovery of Spanish classic theater arrived to
Italy, the selection proposed by Germans was accepted and Calderón was redeemed
according to a partial view. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when schoolars
went further the classical-romantic dispute, Calderón was studied in a less ‘ideological’
way, between returns to anti-Catholicism, historicistic approaches and new readings, as
Italian Hispanism was borning. Our study considers three critical texts of this era: Goisuè
Carducci’s review after witnessing a staging of La vida es sueño, in August of 1869; the
essay by Arturo Graf «La vita è sogno, dramma di Pietro Calderón», published in 1878;
and the article by Ferdinando Martini’s article «Nel secondo centenario di Calderón de
la Barca» of 1881.
