Travel literature
• Travel books
– Popular reading from 16th cent. on
– Personal impressions, anecdotes, autobiographical
details.
– Some information
• Guidebooks
– More anonymous
•Both contribute to the construction of the image of a country.
•Shape the collective imagination
Travel to Italy
Middle Ages
• Pilgrimage, university attendance
• 16th-17th centuries
– young aristocrats often travelled through Europe with a
tutor
– Visited courts of princes, universities, libraries
– in search of polish, civilised manners, learning and
pleasure
• 18th century, Grand Tour
– widespread social practice
– middle classes and women.
• 19th century:
– Whole families
– From midcentury mass tourism, thanks to transportation
and the birth of tourist offices (Thomas Cook)
PELLEGRINI DEL MEDIOEVO
Italy prime destination of 18th century
Grand Tour
• 18th century devotion to classicism
• 18th century devotion to Art
• 18th century cult of Nature
• Italy a common homeground for Europe. The
Grand Tour: search for a common identity
18th century devotion to classicism
Study, imitation and translation of the classics
Buildings imitating classical models are raised in
England
Desire of first hand knowledge of remains of classical
architecture
• Importance of Rome as destination
German aesthetics at the basis of the reinterpretation of
Italy as a locus classicus
Lessing’s Laocoon
Winckelmann’s thoughts on the imitations of the Greeks. His
admiration for the Belvedere Apollo
18th century devotion to Art
• Familiarity with great Renaissance Italian art
– From collections of former grand tourists
– From imitations
• Desire for firsthand knowledge
– Visit to art galleries
– Visit to artists’ studios
• Purchase and commissioning of original and imitation work
• Commissioning portraits of visitors with classical or Italian
background
• Desire to fit the fragments stored in one’s
imagination into the whole picture
18th century cult of Nature
• Admiration of Italian landscape new aspect of last
third of the century .
– 16th and 17th centuries looked at nature from
agricultural and scientific point of view.
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Aesthetic category of the picturesque
Aesthetic category of the sublime
Influence of Rousseau
Influence of landscape painting
– Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Jacob Philipp Hackert
etc.
The sublime
• Aesthetic category of the sublime, first
(supposedly) introduced by Longinus, Greek
rhethorician, author of the treatise On the Sublime.
• Boileau
• Theorized in England by Edmund Burke in A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1765)
• Beauty cannot be explained by reason (as
Winckelmann and neo.classical aesthetics did)
– Aesthetic thrill caused by natural elements that inspire
awe or fear and remind man of the mightiness of divine
creation and threat of destruction
• High mountains, cliffs, volcanoes, waterfalls, caves
• Thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions
• Threatening remains of the past, reminding man of possibility
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of
pain and danger, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is
a source of the sublime; it is productive of the
strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling. (Burke)
The picturesque
• First discussed by landscape gardener William
Gilpin
• Nature seen as a pictorial arrangement of
landscape and human elements, a framed
landscape
• Scenes of daily life
– Made livelier by persons and animals
• Scenes containing ruins and examples of old
architecture were considered particularly
picturesque.
• What is beautiful in its natural state with a certain
"roughness” “irregularity” and ”variety” but with
Italy and the picturesque
• Italy is the imaginary homeland and textual
model of picturesque theory
• Gilpin advocated picturesque travel, in
search of amusement through the enjoyment
of picturesque scenery
[Picturesque beauty]. we pursue through the scenery of nature.
We seek it among all the ingredients of landscape -- trees -- rocks
-- broken-grounds -- woods -- rivers -- lakes -- plains -- vallies -mountains -- and distances..[…] Besides the inanimate face of
nature, it's living forms fall under the picturesque eye, in the
course of travel; and are often objects of great attention. […] In
the same manner animals are the objects of our attention, whether
we find them in the park, the forest, or the field. […] But among
all the objects of art, the picturesque eye is perhaps most
inquisitive after the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the
ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles, and abbeys.
These are the richest legacies of art. They are consecrated by
time; and almost deserve the veneration we pay to the works of
nature itself. (fromWilliam Gilpin, Three Essays on Picturesque
Beauty,. Essay II. On Picturesque Travel (1794).
Europe’s museum and Europe’s
mausoleum
• Contemporary Italy seen as incomplete, deficient
or decadent in comparison to its glorious classical
past
• Neglect of ruins= neglect of common European
legacy
• Misuse of archeological remains for new
constructions
• No present history
• The past overshadows the present; ruins,
monuments and paintings overshadow real people
Immoral Italy
• Italian sexuality and gender roles exert a
“disturbing fascination” on English visitors
– sensuousness and liberty
• Italians seen as soft, effeminate
– creativity a result of effeminacy
• Cicisbeismo
• Italy a sexual hot spot where young English
gentlemen lose their innocence
• Country peopled by go-betweens of both sexes,
organizing a parallel initiation tour.
• Italy a threat for the visitor
Italian indigence and crime
• A backward people
• Live in primitive conditions
– Lack of comfort and hygiene
– Dirty, neglected urban environment
• Poverty
– Disease
– Beggars
• Dishonesty, cheating
• Crime
– theft
– Pickpockets
– Banditti (often romanticized)
Catholicism
• No longer an object of revulsion but rather
of curiosity or ridicule
• Superstitions, miracles, relics made fun of
• Church ceremonies: folkloristic and exotic
shows
– Holy week in Rome
“L’Italia senza gl’italiani”
• Double rhetoric
– Rapture over antiquity, art, nature and climate
– Indifference to social and political set-up
– Contempt for Italians
• No longer machiavellian devils but “poor
devils”.
• Same descriptions as for third world
countries
• Grand tour a peaceful colonization, a
cultural appropriation
Eighteenth century travelogues
• A written testimonial of one’s adventures
on the Grand Tour
• Structured personal narratives.
• Often in diary or letter form
• Close to autobiography
Travelogues vs guidebooks
• Guidebooks came into being at the start of mass
tourism
– Baedeker 1836
– John Murray’s 1837
• Travelogues strongly coloured by the personality
of the writer / Guidebooks impersonal
• Both give advice and information to the traveller
• Distinction between the two genres blurred
A symbolic Colonization
• Colonization may also be a cultural discourse
imposing the colonizer’s views onto places and
people.
– Edward Said Orientalism
• English government involved in
commercialization of antiquities.
– Excavations in Rome
– Excavations in Pompei (Lord Hamilton)
• Travellers brought back souvenirs: pieces of ruins,
artwork; they commissioned paintings of
themselves
• Turned Italy into a sort of theme park
The end of the great season of the
Tour
• The Napoleonic empire brought actual colonisation
• British excluded from travelling in Italy until 1815
• The Romantic myth of Italy tinged by political
connotations
• By mid nineteenth century mass transportation. Railwats.
• Thomas Cook
• Official guidebooks
Murray’s
Baedecker’s
• Victorian England sees the beginnings of mass tourism
– Climatic stays
– The” season”
The Package Tour
– Combined transportation, lodgings, sightseeing,
money exchange, etc.
– First organized by Thomas Cook (1841)
– Cook organized package tours to allow people
to attend temperance meetings (of the Baptist
church)
– Cook negotiated a special fare due to the large
number of people.
– First Thomas Cook tours abroad 1855 for Paris
Exhibition.
– First Italian tour took place in the summer of
1864.
Tivoli; Temple of the Sibyl and the Campagna 1765-70
Wilson Paesaggio italiano”
Turner’s debt was explicit: many years before he made his
own trip to the
Roman Campagna, he copied the Kimbell painting, though
omitting the large tree
Distant View of Maecenas’ Villa, Tivoli about 1756-70
Tivoli. 1817
Turner's 'Tivoli' is sometimes cited as an early example of Turner treating light effects in his characteristic
manner.
Turner's approach greatly influenced French artists of his own generation--and the young Impressionists to
follow.
Tivoli and the Roman Campagna (after Wilson) – 1798 ( Tate-London)
Turner copied the Kimbell painting, omitting the large tree and figures.