ABSTRACT
The existence of an Italian critical tradition which tends to deny visibility to Italian travel writing, and to resist its identification as a genre, helps to explain why, even at a time in which travel books enjoy increasing popularity among the Italian public, both authors, publishers and reviewers prefer to avoid the label in connection with contemporary Italian works (unless they are immediately identified as 'journalism' or 'reportage'). As a result, contemporary Italian travel writing is a genre in disguise, leading a submerged life among 'occasional prose', 'minor works', and other similar labels. This situation makes any analysis of Italian travel writing particularly difficult, since there are no established repertoires nor any operative definitions of the genre, whether normative or descriptive, with which to work.
