Keywords

• This unpublished Diary was written by Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi (1827-1900)
• wife of the leading statesman Ubaldino Peruzzi. She created one of the most influential salons in Italy in the second half of the 19th Century. Over a period of four years (1854-58)
• she recorded a wealth of information on her private life and deepest attachments in her diary
• as well as detailed accounts of her intense social and cultural life. As an example of 19th Century private writing
• these memoirs are of outstanding interest
• revealing a form of private and personal expression that
• as far as we know
• was used by the author for most of her life
• the intensity of the writing reveals the most hidden areas of her feelings
• her secrets
• joys and sorrows.
• However
• Emiliaâ€
• ™
• s diary is not merely a private journal. It is also a faithful mirror of the national and international political events that she observes and records. The Diary covers the period up to the start of the second war of Independence
• at the height of the Risorgimento
• it refers to military actions
• political decisions and social events
• all of which Emilia Peruzzi comments on with knowledge and equanimity. The Diary is important as an autobiography and as a memoir
• but also as a literary and historical document. As a rich documentary source of the kind of language used by a cultivated woman in the 19th Century
• it is also of relevance to the history of language