This exploration of questions of nationality in The Italian is based on Cannon Schmitt's essay "Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian." Schmitt argues that Walpole's construction of the Gothic returned to Shakespearean notions of the "mixed" style of the English bard and to defend against attacks on Shakespeare posed by the French author Voltaire (Schmitt 854).

Schmitt discusses nationalism in The Italian:

The circumstance most clearly responsible for the specific conflicts between foreign and domestic, and one to which little attention has been given, is the novels' relation to English nationalism. The Italian, like the rest of Radcliffe's work, belongs to a period of particular importance in the formation of the English nation and the elaboration of a concept of English national identity. The text presents in its heroine an incarnation of Englishness. In addition, it employs a device enabled by eighteenth-century travel writing but nonetheless specifically attributable to the Gothic: the fictional presentation of foreign landscapes and foreign villians and anti-types, exempla of otherness. (855)

The most prominent of these is Schedoni. Schmitt hints that Schedoni could be "the Italian" (emphasis added) since his foreignness is implicit to the structure of the narrative. Schedoni's first appearance is eminently foreign:

There lived in the Dominican convent of the Spirito Santo, at Naples, a man called father Schedoni; an Italian, as his name imported, but whose family was unknown. (cf. Schmitt 42)

Gothic literature is inherently English, Schmitt concludes, and the suspicion incited by novels such as The Italian only demonstrates "that the paranoid temperament the novels feature ... was communicated to actual readers" (872).