Impressions of Southern Italy ─ British Travel Writing from Henry Swinburne to Norman Douglas

"Naples was conventionally the southernmost stop of the Grand Tour beyond which, it was assumed, lay violent disorder: earthquakes, malaria, bandits, inhospitable inns, few roads and appalling food. On the other hand, Southern Italy lay at the heart of Magna Graecia, whose legends were hard-wired into the cultural imaginations of the educated. This book studies the British travellers who visited Italy's Southern territories. Spanning the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the author considers what these travellers discovered, not in the form of a survey, but as a series of unfolding impressions disclosing multiple Southern Italies. Of the numerous travellers analysed within this volume, the central figures are Henry Swinburne, CraufurdTait Ramage and Norman Douglas, whose Old Calabria (1915) remains in print. Their appeal is that they take the region seriously: Southern Italy wasn't simply a testing ground for their superior sensibilities, it was a vibrant curiosity, unknown but within reach. Was the South simply behind on the road to European integration; or was it beyond a fault line, representing a viable alternative to Northern neuroses? The travelogues analysed in this book address a wide variety of themes which continue to shapediscussions about European identity today"--

Sharon Ouditt is Reader in English at Nottingham Trent University, UK. She is the author of Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (1993) and Women Writers of the First World War: An Annotated Bibliography (1999), and editor of Displaced Persons: Conditions of Exile in European Culture (2002).