ABSTRACT

Seventeenth-century travel accounts often reflect the pervasiveness of baroque aesthetics in Italian literature and culture. This more literary and sometimes baroque trend is evident for instance in Venetian ambassadorial reports to the Senate. If Italian baroque travel writing reflects a more pronounced association between literary-humanist culture and Italianness, and if this writing textualizes Italian subjects whose identity is expressed in terms of cosmopolitanism, Pietro Della Valle's popular epistolary Viaggi provides a unique and novel example of such characteristics. Certainly the cultural crossroads of the Mediterranean offered prime terrain for the Roman traveller to demonstrate his cosmopolitan outlook and his desire to explore foreign territories. Della Valle's cosmopolitanism, as he presents it in the text, is predicated on his ability to adapt in foreign lands and to enjoy the experience of cultural encounters. Della Valle's literary self-consciousness is also discernible in his emulating the lettera familiare genre, a codified form of writing revived by Petrarch using Ciceronian Latin models.