Ossian in Italy

How did the poetry of Ossian (really, James MacPherson) influence Italian opera in the nineteenth century?

Why was Ossian — later acknowledged to be a fraud — so important to the Romantic generation in Italy?

Could it be because these supposedly ancient poems spoke to the longing for a unified culture and community, one based on spiritual aspirations rather than on the arbitrary borders set out by the various monarchies of Europe? In other words: because “Ossian,” as a Scottish poet, addressed issues of the time — including the longing for nationhood among diverse peoples — in a way that would surely have been censored or suppressed if the poems had been “modern”?

As Sante Matteo writes:

Ossianism, as a kind of cultural virus . . . spread quickly and widely. In Britain, which had recently suppressed a series of insurrections in Scotland and solidified its domain over the recently formed “United Kingdom,” these Ossianic characteristics . . . promoted Scottish nationalism and undermined English authority.

So, for all of his purported ancientness, Ossian is about resurgence, rebirth — risorgimento in Italian. The Italian Risorgimento was the political and artistic movement dedicated to Italian liberation and unification.

So we go from early Italian Romantic opera, like this:

to overtly nationalist and revolutionary Italian Romantic opera, like this: