ABSTRACT
The lack of attention to Italian travel writing after the mid-1500s is striking given Italy’s contributions to European culture in general, and also the crucial role that travel and travel literature played in early modern culture. The later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a dramatic increase in the publication of travel narratives throughout Europe, a sign not only of the success of the print industry, but of the popularity and interest this fast-evolving form of writing enjoyed.1 More significantly, travel narratives of this period were critical to molding and modifying discourses on difference. As Joan-Pau Rubiés notes:
These [travel narratives] were important … not for their sheer quantity, but for the position which they occupied in a structure of discourse … Within the cosmographical genres of the Renaissance, none of them had implications as profound as the analysis of human diversity, and especially cultural and religious diversity. The fundamental breakthrough … was not simply to record, but also to interpret difference … The rationalist transformation of European culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cannot be explained without the structuring agency of the discourses of travel literature, in all their moral and empirical diversity.2
