"Under British eyes" : Italy in Addison's and Smollett's travel writing

The paper explores the different ways in which Italy and Italian art, culture, customs, and traditions are depicted and commented upon in two British travelogues of the eighteenth century: Joseph Addison’s Remarks upon Several Parts of Italy (1705) and Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766). By dealing with various aspects of Italian life ‒ from classical to popular culture, from landscape to art works, from places to people ‒ these accounts contribute to the consolidation of the idea of Italy and the Italians as the “Other”, firmly grounded on centuries-old prejudices and stereotypes about the Bel Paese. At the same time, however, the experience of travelling inevitably triggers a process of re-negotiation of the Self whose essential features are modified in the passage from the first to the second half of the century, due to a remarkable change in the way travelling itself is conceived and recorded as well as in the traveller’s attitudes towards outward reality and personal experience.

Contents: ALISON YADERTON, STEFANO VILLANI, Introduction; FRANCO MARENCO, Some New Bearings in Travel Literature; WERNER VON KOPPENFELS, Going South in Fact and Fiction: Two Early Anglo-Italian Travelogues; ROBERTA FERRARI, “Under British Eyes”: Italy in Addison’s and Smollett’s Travel Writing; SHARON OUDITT, Real Tours and Sentimental Journeys: Henry Swinburne and William Beckford in Southern Italy; DANIELA CORONA, Sicily in Coleridge’s Mediterranean Writing; OWAIN J. WRIGHT, Between Italy and Africa: British Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Sardinia; CHRISTOPHER THORPE, The Poetics of Travel in Byron and Shelley: Translating Italian Experience into Artistic Distinction; FABIENNE MOINE, Italian Rewritings by Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: from Constructing a Community of Women to Creating a Place of Poetical Freedom; PETER VASSALLO, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and the cultural appropriation of Renaissance Italy; FRANCESCA PIERI, “This is Tuscany, and Nowhere are the Cypresses so Beautiful and Proud”: D.H. Lawrence’s Travels to Florence, Scandicci and Volterra; LUIGI CAZZATO, The Clash of the two Cultures: North and South in W.H. Auden; BARBARA SCHAFF, “Andate a farvi benedire” and other useful phrases for the English Traveller in John Murray’s Handbooks of Travel Talk; GLORIA CAPPELLI, Travelling words: Languaging in English tourism discourse; WILLIAM T. ROSSITER, Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch: Intralingual and Interlingual Translatio; NIRANJAN GOSWAMI, Translation as Transfer: Thomas Hoby’s The Book of the Courtier; SELENE SCARSI, Robert Tofte’s Two Tales, Translated out of Ariosto; DIEGO PIRILLO, Richard Hakluyt, John Florio and the writing of the Principal Navigations; STEFANO VILLANI, Italian Translations of the Book of Common Prayer; XAVIER CERVANTES,“Thou once great seat of Arms, thou Nurse of Heroes”: History and Romanitas in Early-18th-Century London Opera Librettos; NICK PEARCE,“Directness, quaintness and squalor”: Aspects of Translation and Transformation in Franco Leoni’s Opera L’Oracolo; STEPHEN ORGEL, Shakespeare all’italiana.