Landscape and Imagination: The Italian Mountains in Romantic Travel Writing

The article focuses on a series of Romantic travelogues in order to explore the role the concept of imagination played in the literary representation of mountain landscapes in relation to aesthetic categories such as the sublime and the picturesque. What the article emphasises is the importance of analysing not only the literary representation of the visual aspects of landscape, but also the rendering of its aural aspects, which become central in the description of night travel, where the imaginative activity of travellers is triggered by the sound of water, wind, etc