"Other scenes and other ages": Gissing's Reading of Southern Italy in BY THE IONIAN SEA

George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) can be rather simply described as a travel book produced by an established although, at the time, not wholly successful writer, whose intention was not so much to publish another guide book to the South of Italy, with descriptions of attractive, “picturesque” sceneries, as to reflect on differences – natural as well as cultural – in a first-person narrative. This travelogue – in which the author retraces the steps of part of his third visit to Italy - presents itself by an attractive subtitle: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy . “Ramble” alludes, of course, both to the act of loitering, wandering about, and to a digressive, erratic form of discourse; in this case, an excursion to that region once defined Magna Græcia, as well as an excursus through its signs – human, historic, geographic. “Geographical vagaries and vagaries of the mind” could adequately describe this text. Most of the eighteen chapters in which it is structured draw their titles from the towns and sites visited; the book, though, is not only the chronicle of Gissing’s actual journey to Southern Italy and a re-discovery of the places he had many a time explored with his imagination, but also a rendering of his reaction to his direct contact with Southern Italian culture. With the expression “Other scenes and other ages” I mean to focus on the idea of alterity as referred to Gissing’s representation of Southern Italy. My intention is also to point out the narrative strategies adopted by the writer in this autobiographical book, and explore the ways in which he projects himself into the figure of the narrator-traveller as his alter ego