E. Saprykina’s work about Italian Romanticism is considered in terms of its operation within the principal concepts defining the aesthetics and ideology of Romanticism as such. Shaping the Italian version of Romanticism are a series of central philosophical values, treated by each author in their individual manner. Such method appears especially productive for assessment of the role that the movement played in common European culture, as well as its integrity as a cultural phenomenon. The emergence of Italian Romanticism appears ambivalent: reaction to a complete displacement of the previous centuries’ ethical and aesthetical values exists in dialectical symbiosis with productive reimagining of Classicism. The author convincingly shows that Italian Romantics successfully utilized the experience of their transalpine neighbours, developing their own aesthetics at the same time.