The site is promoted by a research group based at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan.
The practice of travelling acquires through literature metaphorical and symbolic connotations. The exploration of foreign lands becomes through the act of writing an aesthetic exploration and a reflection on cultural models. English travel history can be roughly divided into two broad categories: travelling through Europe between the 16th and the 19th centuries, and the discovery of new lands between the 18th and the 20th centuries.
Travelling becomes more and more popular from the Elizabethan period on, until it becomes a sort of free circulating academy, and certainly the English are the most conspicuous and constant group of travellers in Europe. They establish aims, routes and must-be-seen places in their journey to the springs of knowledge and beauty, the Mediterranean. These travellers write down their notes in diaries from which a new literary genre emerges: the testimony and the memory of a fascinating adventure, which gains momentum in the act of being narrated.
Particularly relevant to our research is the way foreign and different cultures have been perceived and how these experiences create a new literary genre in its own right. Furthermore, a reverse flux of Italian travellers to Britain has produced a number of mostly unpublished manuscripts, that we are trying to investigate and possibly publish.
Whereas the journey to the Mediterranean is a quest for one's own cultural roots, the journey of exploration to new lands may rely on an escapist search for adventure, but certainly calls for a literary technique capable of translating and adapting far away cultures and horizons to the English world. Writing becomes a means of controlling the alarming disorder provoked by the encounter with unknown cultures and landscapes. Like Prospero these writers describe and codify the new-found lands, often without fully understanding Caliban. Hence the birth of postcolonial literatures, that, at the beginning, are not clearly distinct from the native British literary production and from travelogues dedicated to Europe. The journey to new-found lands is often one-way and, differently for the quest towards the Mediterranean, implies the loss of one's own roots and the search for new ones. In the long run these new roots inevitably merge with formerly ignored aboriginal identities, thus giving birth to new cultures and literatures.
A variety of materials related to the above mentioned topics is being acquired and is available for scholars interested in travel literature.