Samuel Butler, un Amico dell’Italia: The History of a Cultural Partnership

Cristiano Turbil offers an insight into the very particular relationship between Samuel Butler and Italy, describing how Butler's work on the Sicilian origin of the Odyssey and his idea of psychophysiology penetrated the Italian intellectual debates of the late-nineteenth century.

Cristiano Turbil is originally from Val Susa, near Turin – a place Samuel Butler visited many times and wrote about in Alps & Sanctuaries. Cristiano completed his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Philosophy at the University of Torino, and is currently a research student in the Department of History at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he is completing a PhD on Samuel Butler’s evolutionary writings and his role in the pan-European scientific community of his time.

This talk was given at the second Butler Day, on Saturday 12th January 2013.