In 1816, the publication in Italian of Madame de Staël’s essay “On the Spirits of Translation” marked the beginning of a controversy between classicists and romantics. The theoretical principles and practices of translation received special attention in Italy, a territory that was trying to define itself in terms of culture, given the impossibility of a unitary political project in this historical period. Translation became the means of enriching Italian language, culture and literature. A Translation Studies perspective focusing on the foreign, rather than the indigenous, traits of Italian culture, will demonstrate how difference, via translation, became one of the constitutive elements of new definitions of Italian national identity.