ABSTRACT
Italy has been constituted over the centuries as a recurrent object of travellers' desire. Whether represented by Shelley's formula of the 'fatal gift of beauty' or by the more prosaic label of the 'Belpaese', the Italian peninsula has inspired innumerable travelogues, diaries and guidebooks. In contrast to this abundance, there appears to be a paucity of travel writing1 produced by Italians, and there is no obvious tradition of studies on Italian travel writing by critics and historians of Italian literature. This double absence constitutes the starting point of the present volume. The intention is to examine the reasons for the second absence (the lack of critical attention devoted to the genre) while simultaneously attempting to show that Italian travel writing not only exists, it is a vital area of contemporary Italian culture. The path to be drawn, then, leads from absence to invisibility, and tries to explain why a genre which in its international (and predominantly Anglo-Saxon) tradition is as popular in Italy as elsewhere, fails to gain recognition when produced by 'home' writers. The policies of publishing houses, the attitudes of authors, and the dominant approaches to travel writing taken by Italian scholars, reveal the historical and ideological context in which the production and reception of Italian travel writing take place. This kind of analysis is important if we want to understand the specific dynamics of the genre in the Italian literary system - yet its implications are much more wideranging.
