ABSTRACT
The idea of teaching travellers what to observe in an analytical way in fact addressed the concept of method, crucial to the transition from rhetoric to science in the Renaissance. In fact instructions for travellers did not originally follow from the initiative of seventeenth-century scientific academies: instead, the scientific institutions had become depositaries of a concern for travel literature and for methodical travel which clearly belonged to the cultural transformations of the late Renaissance. It is indeed remarkable the extent to which the "methods" for travelling went beyond the mere theoretical models provided by writers of logic and rhetoric, to become a practice discussed and exercised by actual travelers who read, and sometimes wrote, about the countries they visited. The problem of truth was best left to the quality of the traveller, who was meant to respond with honesty to direct experiences.
