Travelling In and Out of Italy

Download or read book Travelling In and Out of Italy written by Emanuele Occhipinti and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel has often been taken as a metaphor for human life, and the concept of travel and the traveller has varied across centuries, cultural traditions, and social groups. Following a diachronic overview of travel writing, this study considers some of the most important Italian writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, such as D’Annunzio, Pirandello, Svevo, with particular focus on their note-books, letters, travel diaries, and reportage. An analysis of this material indicates that these authors collect their miscellaneous notes, in some cases, as private and personal documents, and in other instances to possibly develop future articles, essays or novels. It goes on to focus on the journey par excellence, the trip to America, regarded as an Eden. In many of their works, writers such as Ojetti, Giacosa, Cecchi, Piovene express their ambivalence towards a place often idealized as a land of freedom and opportunity, yet also acknowledged as a land where oppression and violence are all too real. The study attempts to demonstrate how all the traveller-writers discussed “translate” their sense of discovery in their books, and the extent to which that sense affects the conception of each of the texts.