Università Roma Tre

Travel’s reports of the past are a preferred source for the construction of geographical thought and culture. Particularly between the late Middle Ages and Modern Age, travel’s relations allows to retrace the complex process of widening of Europeans’ geographical horizon. In western society the relationship between geography and travel’s reports has changed over the centuries, to the need to sort and reprocess the information gathered, to create a geographical knowledge built on valid rules, correlations between phenomena and rational criteria for classification. During the course will be analyzed practices of travel, travelers and travel’s reports, in their various types. Will also be considered some examples of travel’s reports that, throughout history, have marked the collective imagination and the construction of the world’s modern image. Testimony of travel’s experiences, travel literature has become ever more an instrument of knowledge of the territory and of human communities, through understanding the other and the elsewhere, but also the culture that looks at the other and at the space, for as this was and still is organized on the basis of many human needs (exploration, knowledge, tourism, etc.).

Texts:

Two articles from the issue Geotema, n° 8 (1997), Ilaria Luzzana Caraci (a cura di), Il viaggio come fonte di conoscenze geografiche (The magazine is difficult to find, ask the teacher):
- Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, Dall’esperienza del viaggio al sapere geografico, pp. 3-12;
- Claudio Cerreti, Breve ragionamento intorno ai sette paradossi principali del viaggio, pp. 52-59.

Guglielmo Scaramellini, La geografia dei viaggiatori. Raffigurazioni individuali e immagini collettive nei resoconti di viaggio, Milano, Unicopli, 1993 o 1998, Introduzione, pp. 9-15 and Parte seconda, pp. 55-111.