Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Giovanni Antonio Guardi, Francesco Guardi and Canaletto. An improvising poet crowned at the Capitol loves an English peer who cannot marry a woman the world admires, and the two countries in the book are as much characters as the lovers. Madame de Staël published Corinne in 1807 while exiled by Napoleon, who understood exactly what it was arguing. It made Italy fashionable for a generation of northern travellers. Fifty-six plates of Venetian capricci and harbour views by Canaletto and Francesco Guardi, the painted Italy that Madame de Staël's heroine and her northern readers carried in their minds.

Madame de Staël (1766-1817) was the daughter of Necker, Louis XVI's finance minister, kept the most important salon in Europe, and was exiled from Paris by Napoleon, who found her more dangerous than an army. Her book on Germany introduced Romanticism to France.