Crossroads of the <i>Life</i> of Vittorio Alfieri

Abstract This article examines Vittorio Alfieri's Life as a deliberately constructed narrative of cultural, linguistic, and political self‐fashioning within eighteenth‐century European intellectual networks. Rather than treating the autobiography as a transparent record of experience, the article argues that Alfieri retrospectively reorganizes his education, travels, and ideological shifts to produce a coherent image of himself as an Italian tragic author. By focusing on three decisive moments — the French‐dominated formative years, the spiemontizzazione of 1778, and the political and linguistic conversion associated with Tuscany and Siena — this study shows how Alfieri systematically minimizes his French cultural debts while foregrounding a Tuscan‐centred Italian identity. The article contributes to eighteenth‐century studies by demonstrating how autobiographical writing functions as a strategic tool for redefining cultural belonging, political thought, and literary authority in a period marked by transnational circulation and ideological fracture.