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.).

Not attending

Numa Broc, La Geografia del Rinascimento. Cosmografi, cartografi, viaggiatori, Modena, Franco Cosimo Panini, 2007.

Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, Trovare, cercare, scoprire. Le tappe della scoperta, in Il mondo dei vichinghi, Ambiente, storia, cultura ed arte, Genova, SAGEP, 1991, pp. 57-77 (The volume is available at the Petrocchi Library. In case of problems, ask the teacher).

This program will be valid from the summer session (May-June) 2020 (and until that of February 2021), since the course will take place in the second semester.