Travel Writing as a Historical and Archaeological Source (Ordinario)

Learning by doing: credits awarded for contribution to database and final presentation.

Built around the principle of learning by doing, the course awards academic credit on the basis of active participation, contribution to the course database, and the critical analysis of the material collected within an agreed research topic. Each participant will present the results of their work either as an oral presentation (supported by PowerPoint) or as a written paper.

The course is open to both "allievi ordinari" and PhD students (perfezionandi), regardless of their year of study. It has been designed so that students at the beginning of their academic training and those at a more advanced stage can participate together and benefit from material that is rarely covered in standard textbooks.

Although Module 1 is compulsory only for students (ordinari) in the early years, attendance is strongly recommended for senior ordinari students and PhD students as well. These introductory sessions lay the foundations for many of the themes explored in greater depth in the subsequent modules and should therefore be regarded as an essential introduction to the course as a whole.

Students who choose to attend only Module 3 will nevertheless be provided with the introductory materials covered in Module 1, so that they have the necessary background for the topics discussed later in the course.

Travel Writing as a Historical and Archaeological Source

Travel has accompanied human history since its beginnings. Yet it is through the written account of a journey that movement becomes knowledge, memory and a way of making sense of the world. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Italy, Greece and the Ottoman Empire were crossed by European travellers whose journals, letters and published accounts recorded encounters, observations and drawings. Read critically, these texts are an exceptionally rich source for historical and archaeological research. They preserve glimpses of landscapes that have since disappeared, describe monuments now lost or transformed, trace the discovery, reuse and dispersal of antiquities, and illuminate the changing ways in which the ancient past was understood and valued.

Travel narratives also reveal the networks of people who made travel possible: interpreters, dragomans, antiquarians, merchants, consuls, local guides, scholars and officials who mediated access to places, objects and knowledge. At the same time, they offer a unique perspective on the European perception of antiquity, the emergence of archaeological imagination, collecting practices, the circulation of antiquities and the cultural relationships between the western and eastern Mediterranean.

The course explores early modern travel literature as a privileged source for reconstructing the material and cultural history of the Mediterranean. From the very first weeks, students will work directly with primary sources, selecting a corpus of travel accounts together with a monument, archaeological site or landscape to investigate. Through an interdisciplinary, seminar-based approach, they will acquire the methodological tools needed to transform travel narratives into evidence for historical and archaeological research.

Teaching combines seminars with practical workshops devoted to analysing, cataloguing and mapping the sources. Monuments, artefacts, itineraries, individuals, networks of cultural mediation and archaeological contexts will be progressively incorporated into a Web-GIS database designed not simply as a digital archive, but as a collaborative research environment. By selecting, organising and interpreting evidence, students will explore how historical data are created and how narrative sources can be transformed into historical and archaeological knowledge.

The course is organised into three progressive modules. Module 1 introduces the theoretical and methodological foundations for the critical reading of travel literature. Module 2 applies these approaches through seminar discussion and collaborative research centred on the Web-GIS database. Module 3, reserved for PhD students (perfezionandi), develops a more advanced critical engagement with the research results and encourages an active role in leading seminar discussions and contributing to the collective research project.

Module 1 – From Travel to Research

This introductory module provides the conceptual and methodological foundations for the course. Topics include: the origins and development of travel literature; travel in the Mediterranean between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; women and men as travellers; perceptions of antiquity; travel accounts as historical and archaeological sources; reconstructing the biographies of places, monuments and artefacts; cultural mediation and access to antiquities; excavation, collecting and the circulation of antiquities; transforming travel narratives into structured research data; and the design of an individual or group research project.

Module 2 (“Ordinari” and PhD cnadidates)

Module 2 develops the themes introduced in Module 1 through 10 hours of seminar discussion devoted to selected case studies (itineraries, archaeological sites and monuments, artefacts, travellers and cultural intermediaries) and 10 hours of practical work on the Web-GIS database. The laboratory is conceived as a collaborative research environment in which students develop their own projects while addressing methodological and interpretative questions collectively. PhD students will play an active mentoring role, supporting junior students in source analysis, data organisation and methodological reflection.

Throughout the course, students will be provided with supporting teaching and research materials, together with further reading on the topics discussed. Additional, topic-specific bibliographies will be recommended to the individual research groups formed during the course. By way of illustration, a preliminary selection of general readings is provided below.

• Leed, E., La mente del viaggiatore. Dall’Odissea al turismo globale, Bologna, 1991.
• Manga, L., “Travel and Travel Writing: an Historical Overview of Hodeorics”, Annali d’italianistica, 14, 1996, pp. 6–54.
• Papotti, D., “Attività odeporica ed impulso scrittorio: la prospettiva geografica sulla redazione di viaggio”, Annali d’italianistica, 21, 2003, pp. 393–407.
• Robinson, J., Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers, Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Thompson, C. (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing, Routledge Literature Companions, London: Routledge, 2015.
• Youngs, T., The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Cambridge Introductions to Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.