‘Horrors and Magnificence without End’: British travellers to Calabria from 1779 to 1915

This work explores the transmission and influence of travel literature by British travellers to Calabria over a long century of change: industrial development, empire and nation-building. Travel literature both reflects and influences ideas about places and cultures, and provides the opportunity to observe contemporary reactions and understandings of society, politics and religion. This work examines the notions of Italy, and especially Calabria, constructed by British people since the earliest days of travel to the continent. The central argument of this work is that travel, particularly from the time of the Grand Tour onwards, influenced the construction of the idea of Italy and Calabria. Italy has for a very long time been a place of English “desiring”, but what constitutes this Italy that is desired? One might assume from the literature available that this was a place to be found only north of Naples. Looking at publications, websites and other representations today, it appears that this may still be the case. I argue that the itineraries of the eighteenth-century Classical Grand Tour and the nineteenth-century Romantic Grand Tour created an imaginative geography of Italy based on the desire for classical and Renaissance sites. This research will reflect the work already done on imaginative geography. I argue that the construction of an imaginative geography of Italy constructed by the Grand Tour itinerary, still means “Italy” today. The “crystallisation” of travel paths and writings into an imaginative geography of Italy, produces, in turn, a number of facets, a proliferation of imaginary geographies of the various Italies of the travel literature. The work describes the changing nature of the traveller’s “gaze” through which difference and the Other is viewed; the consequences for Calabrians of representations that firmly place them and their region as part of a pre-European past; and the development of the British identity in contrast to British perceptions of Italian, and particularly Calabrian, identity, during a period that saw the rise of the British Empire