Rappaccini’s Daughter: Style 1 key example

The style of "Rappaccini's Daughter" is formal and ornate. This is particularly evident in the narrator's verbose, even mannered, way of introducing of Giovanni and his introduction to his new home in Padua: 

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. [...] The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the occupants of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his Inferno. 

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