The Italian has a dark, mysterious, and somber tone which fixates on the themes of love, devotion, and persecution during the time period of Holy Inquisition.

Radcliffe's renowned use of veiled imagery is considered to have reached its height of sophistication and complexity in The Italian; concealment and disguise are central motifs of the novel.

[4] The plot starts in Naples, Italy in the 18th century, in the church of Santa Maria del Pianto, where an English traveller is speaking with an Italian friar.

When Vivaldi's mother, the proud Marchesa, hears about his love for a poor orphan, she appeals to her ambitious and cunning confessor, Father Schedoni, to prevent the marriage, with a promise that she will help him obtain promotion in his order.

But moments before they are to take their vows before a priest at a church, agents claiming to work for the Inquisition, informed by Schedoni, interrupt and arrest Vivaldi on the false charge of abducting a nun from a convent.

Father Schedoni, condemned to die, poisons himself and Nicola di Zampari, and calls a tribunal including the Marchese and Vivaldi to witness their final confessions at his deathbed.

Ann Radcliffe uses the technique of scene imagery to evoke emotion in characters,[5] and to describe landscapes and surroundings in extreme detail.

Aside from imagery being described as physical art, Radcliffe includes images of personification, animals, religion, storms, magic, and enchantment.

[7] Images in the novel make it possible to see one thing in the expressions of something else,[8] reason as to which Radcliffe creates anxiety from descriptions of terror and the uncanny.

"The solemnity of the scene accorded with the temper of his mind, and he listened in deep attention for returning sounds, which broke upon his ear like distant thunder muttering imperfectly from the clouds".

(page 12 Oxford World Classics Edition) All of the imagery presented in The Italian pull the novel together by way of description, which sets the scene for the reader and the characters.

[10] As Kröger and Miller explain, "Ghosts are spooky but the true threat was one she saw in the real world: men who were willing to abuse women in order to gain wealth" (24).

[12] This poetic element was referred to in multiple reviews of Radcliffe's The Italian and is considered to be the defining characteristic of the author's many Gothic works.

[12][13] In a time where writing novels for commercial consumption was one of the only means through which a female author could earn a respectable living, The Italian was a great financial success for Radcliffe.

Characterised as a man governed by an amalgam of anger, hypocrisy and guilt, the monk was praised as standing apart from the traditional conventions of Gothic protagonists, and many readers approved of his strong personality.

[15] Not only was he considered one of the best characters, but one of the best villains; he had "great energy, with strong passions, and inordinate pride; sometimes softened by the feelings of humanity, but preserving the firmnesss of his mind in the most trying situations".

[16] However, many of these reviews found a fault in the extent of his wicked nature, and others asserted that Radcliffe's careful handling of his character and attempt to implement a touch of parental affection to soften him only served to make him seem less realistic.

[17] Reviews that were run in response to The Italian echo these tensions between approval and disappointment in what would be the final novel of Radcliffe's Gothic career.

[18] The writer of a 1797 review in The Monthly Review praised Radcliffe's visual and descriptive language in the novel, citing "the part…which displays the greatest genius, and the most force of description, is the account of the scenes which passed in the long house on the shore of the Adriatic, between Schedoni, Ellena, and Spalatro: – The horrible sublimity which characterises the discovery made by the former that Ellena was his daughter, at the instant in which he was about to stab her, was perhaps unparalleled".

[20] Similarly, a later evaluation in the Edinburgh Review described the mastery of Ann Radcliffe's narrative description as allowing the reader to almost see, feel and experience the events on the Mediterranean alongside the characters.

[23] Following Radcliffe's retirement after this novel at the young age of thirty-two, and her death a few decades later, public opinion of her overall works including The Italian swung to a more positive light.

Upon her death in 1823, the political and social atmosphere in England had changed again and Radcliffe regained positive assessments of her importance in the history of Gothic writers.

Although the church is painted in a negative light, likely due to Radcliffe's own Protestant ideology, the convent Santa Maria del Pianto is shown as a refuge from "motherhood, wifehood, and the heterosexual lover.

"[32] Unlike the characters in Lewis' novel, reviewers observed that Radcliffe illustrated that guilt and depravity can be constructed upon the desire for absolute power rather than mere sexuality, and their source is ultimately human rather than demonic.

[35] The plot follows the three stages of the romantic comedy model and parallels many of Shakespeare's plays including "the thwarted love" present in Romeo and Juliet, the villa scene where Vivaldi overhears Ellena nearly a facsimile of the balcony scene;[36] Olivia's reappearance after years of faking her death mirroring the character Hermione, and Olivia's daughter Ellena being brought up in a lower class than her birth mirroring the Hermione's daughter Perdita in The Winter's Tale;[37] the play within the play wherein Schedoni sees his own actions depicted just as Claudius does in Hamlet, as well as Schedoni murdering his brother and marrying his wife just as Claudius;[38] the "aura of superstition and fear" that Schedoni and Spalatro experience while preparing to kill Ellena "is almost taken verbatim from Macbeth”, as Spalatro sees the ghost of the man he killed, just as Macbeth sees Banquo, and both men experience the delusional states of paranoia both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth experience during and after Duncan's murder;[39] Schedoni mimics Iago from Othello as he psychologically manipulates other characters, and his manipulations are the catalyst for the major conflicts in the plot.

Ellena has the beloved status of Juliet with the pride of Cordelia from King Lear; Vivaldi is the passionate lover like Romeo; and Father Schedoni, the most developed character in the novel, is a manipulator like Iago, tortured by his love for Ellena just as Othello is tortured by his love for Desdemona, faces the oncoming, inevitable consequences of his bloodshed just as Macbeth.