Un italiano al servizio del pasha d’Egitto. Alfonso Nuzzo Mauro e la narrazione della catastrofe di Missolungi

In the context of the rich literary production of Philhellenic inspiration, the siege of Missolonghi had a wide impact such as few other episodes of the Greek Revolution. The events of Missolonghi and the heroic resistance of its inhabitants aroused great dismay in European public opinion and inspired a lot of literary works: short texts, poems and dramas circulated in form of printed pamphlets or in periodicals, even many years after the siege. The catastrophe of Missolonghi and The slave of the bazaar, by Alfonso Nuzzo Mauro, published in Italy (1830) and France (1836), fits entirely into this long and varied literary tradition. The author, who was the personal physician of Ibrahim Pasha declares himself an eyewitness of the events and retraces the siege from an unprecedented perspective: he combines the historical narration and the fictional story of the characters, enriches the text with exotic and ethnographic details that run through all the pages of his work.