L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 2015 www.italoamericano.com L'Italo-Americano 9 Since the advent of travel in the Medieval period, Italy has alw ays been the focus of European voyagers. In the begin- ning, early travel books were w ritten as guides for the Medieval religious pilgrim seek- ing Christian sites in Italy. With the growth of an educated upper class in Europe, principally in England, travel began to take on a more secular focus. By the end of the eighteenth century, edu- cated travelers , es pecially English Protestant travelers, focused on Roman sites. By the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury, this journey became known as the Grand Tour, a voyage that became a necessary component of every upper-class individual's education, women and men. Italy became not just the geo- graphical terminus of a traveler's voyage s outh, but the very ragion d'essere of the Grand Tour. In England, classical edu- cation at Oxford and Cambridge focused on what we term today the classics, Greek and Roman his tory, literature, and art. Included in their decades' long immersion in Latin, young men and upper-class women could not consider themselves properly educated if they had not read Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. These early travelers focused, as well, on the w orks of Italian Renaissance artists, above all Da V inci, M ichelangelo, and Raphael, including the school of painters surrounding them. They thought little of the later Mannerists, whom they felt were merely trying to paint in the "manner" of the great Renaissance painters, but failed. The Baroque, including the great Caravaggio, who received scant attention from these early travel- ers , w as cons idered a low er order of Italian artistic achieve- ment. Fortunately, Grand Tour trav- elers were prolific writers, leav- ing behind scores of travel books detailing their subjective and culturally-laden impressions of eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-century Italy. Not sur- prisingly, their accounts reveal that Italy was located more in their minds than in its geogra- phy. They brought with them, especially Protestant travelers, their constructions, both ideal- ized and not so complimentary of Italian Catholic culture. London-based scholar and writer, Chloe Chard has selected a small sample of Grand Tour writing in her Tristes Plaisirs: A Critical Reader of the Romantic Grand Tour. Each chapter con- tains selections from Grand Tour travel books introduced by insightful introductions. The general theme of her book is the variable and often problematic nature of travelers' experiences. Accustomed to the comforts of the manor, they found them- selves in an alien land where they w ere forced to endure uncomfortable accommodations and unpalatab le food. M ore interesting, as sophisticated and educated as they w ere, they peered into an historical past, both pagan Rome and Renais s ance, Catholic Italy, including contemporary Italian society, that they found alien and at times offens ive to their English social and religious val- ues. Their responses to their travel experiences are represent- ed in the title of Chad's work, Triste Plaisirs (Sad Pleasures), and her chapter titles: Pleasure, Rising and Sinking in Sublime P laces , D angers and Destabilization, Art, Unease and Life, and finally Gastronomy: Gusto and the Geography of the Haunted. A s Englis hw oman Lady Morgan writes, by the time she reached N aples , s he w as on overload: she was homesick, exhausted both physically and morally, and her curiosity blunt- ed. Travel becomes, in Germaine de S tael's w ords , a "tr is te plaisirs," (a sad pleasure). The demands that travel makes upon the tourist, especially in Italy, both intellectually and physical- ly, require a careful "manage- ment of pleas ure." In Italy, w hich contains according to UNESCO 85% of the world's art, the traveler simply cannot see it all, not even in a lifetime. Because of their extensive classi- cal studies, the early travelers on the Grand Tour found them- selves caught between the famil- iar and the foreign. Thes e Protestant travelers delighted in the ancient Roman sites that they had studied, but were not so sure of the idealized representation of Catholic culture in works of art and, above all, Rome's lavishly ornate baroqu e Cathedrals . Thes e gilded temples in the midst of Rome's and Naples' poor only reinforced their anti- Catholic notions of a corrupt, sacrilegious papacy. Worse, they were appalled by contemporary Italian Catholic impiety where dogs ran wild in the churches, babies squalled, parishioners talked, and men spat on the floor during Mass. When confronted by either the beauty of a landscape or a work of art, the traveler was both uplifted and disheartened. The great Romantic critic, William Hazlitt expressed it well when he wrote that travelers simultane- ously felt themselves "raised in their own thoughts" at the scale of a landscape or object of art but at the same time felt "their personal insignificance by the grandeur" of what they are observing. W h e n e n t e r - i n g the Sistine Chapel and looking up, w ho has not had this experience? That feeling of insignificance is amplified when the traveler is informed that he painted the entire ceiling by him- self without the aid of artisans. How he could have painted the ceiling is incomprehens ible. When workers took down the scaffolding on the first half of the ceiling and Rafael saw what Michelangelo had accomplished, he returned to his just completed masterpiece in the adjoining room, The School of Athens, took a chisel, and hacked out a corner of the fresco, and in tribute to Michelangelo painted an image of him into the work. Today, the Grand Tour expe- rience is still much like our own. A ls o, challenging the G rand Tour traveler's enjoyment was the constant danger that they faced from brigands, stormy seas, unsafe roads, and debilitat- ing ill-health. Today, we face the destabilizing fear of terrorism, viruses on planes, and the poten- tial theft of our documents. Only recently ISSL has vowed to tar- get Italy. As English woman Maria Graham says in her 1819 travel account, the traveler must beware of the "desultory habits of th e outlaw ." S he then recounts her shock on coming upon a murder scene. In A rt, U neas e and Life, Chard recounts the unease even sophisticated, educated travelers felt while standing before nude s tatuary. It w as common in Protestant writers' journals to record the degree of "undressi- ness," as one Protestant traveler wrote, of so many public statues in Italy. In fact, to appease their Protestant visitors, the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican was f i t - t e d w i t h a fig leaf, held in place by a w ire. A s one traveler w rote, the fig leaf w as more offensive than what it intended to hide. The final chapter on G as tronomy is among the most interest- ing. Today, Italy is known for its cuisine, but not so for the early traveler. Ins tead, Italy w as renowned for its natural land- s cape and its cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, including its wild game and fish. Writers often wrote, not of their exquis- ite dining experiences, but about their outdoor picnics held in Italy's "luminous" landscape of fruits , vegetables , nuts , and grapes. They described in their writing what had by the begin- ning of the nineteenth century in Dutch, French, German, and Italian landscape paintings a conventional, idealized the image of Italy as a sun-bathed land that produced an abundance of natural products, including, of course, wine. As the still life paintings (natura morta) of the period demonstrate, they depict- ed a w ide variety of natural products and an equally wide range of wild game and fish. If travelers did have prepared meals, they were composed of roas ted local game, again a product closely aligned with the landscape. Stendhal wrote that having the local thrush was "one of the greates t pleas ures of Lombardy." Prepared dinners were more often served to the traveler in the hos tels or boarding hous es where they stayed. It is under- standable why they might com- plain about such food, prepared on the cheap by inexperienced hands. Finding palatable wine, especially wine that had not spoiled, was problematic for the traveler. Too often early travel w riters , es pecially from England, complained about the food in Italy and could not wait to return home to have a good meal. They had little contact as foreigners with Italy's develop- ing culinary tradition. Though there w ere many publis hed cook books before him, P ellegrino A rtus i's landmark w ork, Science in the Kitchen and the Ar t of Eating Well published in 1891, brought together in one work the long-developing cul- ture of Italian cooking that we identify with Italy today. Even if these English travelers were able to sample regional cuisine, the palate being what it is, we can't be certain that they would have approved of the dishes they were served. Years of taking fast-food consuming American students to Italy has informed me that unfortunately the American palate even today still has trouble with Italian cui- sine. Have you ever seen the look of bewilderment on the face of a traveler when served carciofi alla giudia? As Chard demonstrates in her selection of texts, we can sym- pathize with our forebears. We share today some of their same travel problems. Italy is among the mos t problematic of the countries. How to manage our time and not make our travel there more a tribulation than a pleas ure? H ow long is long enough in Rome or Florence? How can the traveler see the beauty of the countryside, north and south, without having to negotiate a foreign highway sys- tem? It is never easy. That is why we have had the growth of tour companies in recent decades. They attempt to take out the "tristes" of foreign trav- el and jus t leave the "plaisirs." But that removes so much of the depth and signifi- cance of foreign travel. That is, indeed, molto triste. Ken Scambray is the author of A Varied Harvest: The Life and Wor ks of H enr y Blake Fuller, The North American Italian Renaissance: Italian Writing in America and Canada, Sur face Roots : Stor ies , and Q ueen Calafia's Par adis e: Califor nia and the Italian American Novel. KENNETH SCAMBRAY Tristes Plaisirs: A Critical Reader of the Romantic Grand Tour by Danilo Dolci. Trans. by Chloe Chard. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2014.

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