Courting Celebrity

In 1826 Angela Veronese, a gardener’s daughter, wrote and published the first modern autobiography by an Italian woman. Veronese’s account focuses on her unique experience as a peasant girl who came of age among the Venetian elite, and details how she attained a certain renown in and out of Italy by improvising, writing, and publishing her own lyrics.

Courting Celebrity is a bilingual annotated edi...