Views of Greece

And here we have Greece! It is for her that I have crossed this great sea, I have left Italy, my parents and friends. All for this land! [...] What does it matter that Sparta, Athens and Corinth have disappeared forever? The land on which they stood, still contains the sublime ideas that inspired in the past... and the silence! The silence that moves me and that I breathe in this majestic theatre in which so many glorious deeds took place.

These words, which are taken from the book Journey in Greece (1799) by the abbot Saverio Scrofani, are representative of the attractions that led European culture to rediscover Greece, from the 18th century onward. For many centuries, Western Europe had ignored or forgotten Greece. The glory and the influence of Byzantium were very far off in the distance. Even during the Renaissance, Greece was only embraced in a partial, limited manner. Meanwhile, Ottoman domination, decadence and the Orthodox Church had buried ancient Greece in oblivion. However, with the Enlightenment, interest gradually began to revive in Greek “antiques”. And, against a background of the Greeks' fight for their independence, this culminated in Romanticism, the movement that brought Europe together with Greece. This was the solid base on which modern philohellenism was built, the derivations of which have survived to the present day. Between the ideal and the reality, Greece has been a constant in the imaginary of the West. The series of lectures that we are hosting represents an attempt to reassess some of the most significant points in this relationship. The history of the Catalans plays a very significant role in this area.