ABSTRACT
One of the most fruitful approaches to the study of the city is in the analysis of travel reports, both graphic and literary.
The journey to an unknown city, in fact, always involves a careful exploration—that cannot be achieved without both a physical and corporeal relationship, in which the foreign eyes manage to catch things that escape its inhabitants—and the need to remember, document, analyze, interpret, understand, represent and tell it, for oneself and for others.
In this sense, they are also fundamental the descriptions of cities in the literary works of some writers, that have linked their name to some particular city, in which they have placed scenarios of the narrated adventures, constructing or consolidating their myth or re-inventing it. In some cases they have represented it only in the topographic, architectural and spatial articulation; in other they have attempted to reveal its pulsating, underground, obscure life, to convey the unique and unrepeatable atmosphere that gives it life, coming to grasp the mysterious charm of his teeming humanity, the inexplicable imbalance or the incredible harmony between his body and his soul.
Such intense relationships have been established precisely because in many works of these authors the city is protagonist—as well as the characters, sometimes more than the characters but often thanks to their movement in its world universe and their relations with its geometrical space; as a subject and as an object: an organism supported by intricate spatial patterns, that assure its vital functions and allow its independent existence, and set of human events, which develop in it.
