In the Poets' Footsteps: Literature, Tourism, and Regional Promotion

150 Pages·2021·20.866 MB·English

by  Giovanni Capecchi

In the Poets’ Footsteps
Mini-Monographs in
Literary and Cultural Studies
volume 1
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/mlcs
In the Poets’ Footsteps
Literature, Tourism, and Regional Promotion
By
Giovanni Capecchi
Translation by
John Costanzo
leiden | boston
The translation of this book is funded by Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Pistoia e Pescia.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Capecchi, Giovanni author. | Costanzo, John translator.
Title: In the poets’ footsteps : literature, tourism, and regional
promotion / Giovanni Capecchi ; translation by John Costanzo.
Other titles: Sulle orme dei poeti. English
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2022. | Series: Mini-monographs in
literary and cultural studies, 2772-5464 ; vol.1 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021046468 (print) | LCCN 2021046469 (ebook) | ISBN
9789004472488 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004501836 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Geography and literature–Italy. | Tourism–Italy. |
Literature, Modern–History and criticism. | Travelers’ writings–Italy.
| Literary journeys–Italy. | Historic house museums–Italy.
Classification: LCC PN56.G48 C3713 2022 (print) | LCC PN56.G48 (ebook) |
DDC 809.9332–dc23/eng/20211029
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046468
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021046469
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
issn 2772-5464
isbn 978-90-04-47248-8 (paperback)
isbn 978-90-04-50183-6 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be
addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com.
This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
Contents
Preface vii
1 Literary Tourism 1
1 Literature and Geography 1
2 Poetic Maps 4
3 Writers and Territorial Marketing 9
4 The Origins of Literary Tourism 12
5 Authentic Locations, Invented Locations 21
6 Time, Absence, Memory 29
2 Literary Guides 34
1 Aci Trezza without Verga 34
2 Giampaolo Dossena and “Literary Locations” 39
3 Watching Europe, Watched from Europe 41
4 Literary Guides: Types and Classifications 47
5 The Writer as Guide 54
3 Writers’ Homes 60
1 “There is the Poet’s Home”: Ugo Ojetti in the Rooms of the
Writers 60
2 House Museums, Houses without Museums, Museums
without Houses 63
3 Writers’ Houses: Classifications and Types 73
4 From House to House 80
5 Narrate, Reinventing 83
6 The Story of One’s Own Home, the Story of Others’ Homes 88
7 A Room All to Herself 97
4 Literary Parks 100
1 The Two Nievo’s 100
2 “Against the Corruption of Landscapes” 103
3 The Season of Global Subsidy 106
4 The Park “System” 108
vi Contents
5 Literary Festivals 114
1 “A Festival is First and Foremost a Location” 114
2 Topic, Time, Space 117
3 Effetto Festival 120
Illustrations 128
Index 137
Preface
This book was born, first and foremost, from a personal interest in literary loca-
tions. I am among those who, before setting out on a trip, choose a poetic work
or a work of fiction that is connected to the location they are about to visit, as
their travel companion and who, during their tour, abandon the more beaten
paths of tourism in order to visit buildings, small towns, and streets that poetry
has passed through. Such an interest - that someone, not erroneously, could
define as mania - was accompanied, over time, by the collection of material re-
lated to the topic of “literature and tourism”: literary guides, catalogues of writ-
ers’ homes, newspaper clippings, various notes during visits, of conferences, or
reading seminars.
Cultural interests, more closely linked to an education as an Italianist (which
also led to the writing of a literary guide on the mountains of Pistoia, published
in 2008), was intertwined with curiosity about aspects that we could define as
organizational and managerial, in the attempt to better understand how liter-
ary tourism works, which reflections are made on the subject by economists,
marketing and geography experts, the problems related to the creation and
management of a literary Park or Festival, which stages lead to the opening of a
house museum and how these spaces are designed, set up, managed, and pro-
moted. The most “concrete” side of the literary interest is at least in part related
to an administrative experience had in my city, Pistoia, as councillor of culture
and tourism: an experience during which issues related to the organization
of events, the evaluation of their impact also in economic terms, the search
for funding and contributions, and the management of cultural spaces, were
on the agenda (museums, libraries, theatres). That commitment in the local
administration gave birth to, in more recent years, the direction of “ Naturart”,
a magazine focused on the promotion of our region through culture and land-
scape, as well as through the enhancement of experiences of excellence in the
production field.
When my University (Università per Stranieri di Perugia) decided to open
a new undergraduate degree course on “Made in Italy, food, and hospitality”
(that puts two large topics together: that of tourism and that of the production
of traditional products and enogastronomy), I proposed to include in the study
program a discipline called “Literature, tourism and promotion of the terri-
tory”. This teaching experience (which has been and continues to also be a re-
search and study experience) has flanked the activity closest to what we could
define as the orthodoxy of Italianism and has represented, in some respects,
a pleasant distraction. I was able to verify, with the students that attended my
classes, young peoples’ interest in these topics, the desire to measure oneself
viii Preface
on literary issues connecting them to the concreteness of the promotion of the
region; together with them, seminars and trips were organized, which from
time to time allowed us to meet artistic directors and festival organizers, presi-
dents, founders and directors of literary parks or house museums; I then began
- again with these students - a research project related to the writing of gradu-
ation thesis.
It was thus possible to measure oneself against a given fact: the lack of a
text that could perform the function of an overall framework, proposing the
main aspects of the issue, with the tools of those who deal daily with litera-
ture but also trying to build up some small (and inadequate) knowledge in
areas such as the geography of tourism, the setting up and management of
exhibition spaces, and creativity marketing. It should be clear: in these latter
listed areas, I do not claim to work with particular competence; but these are
sectors with which even the Italianist must come into contact if he wants to
deal with literature, tourism, and regional promotion, all the more so since it
is geographers, marketing scholars and museologists who have been primarily
concerned with this issue until now.
The book, which was published in Italy in 2019 and is now being released -
with some updates - in Spain and Great Britain - is dedicated to my wife, Fran-
cesca, who accompanied me during some literary trips, including the one that
lead us - when we were very young - to visit Tȏtes (a town hidden in the plains
of Normandy) as it was connected to the memory of Emma Bovary and to cross
- in that same location - the threshold of a small hotel for the sole reason that
Guy de Maupassant had set some pages of Boule de suif in that building.
Chapter 1
Literary Tourism
1 Literature and Geography
In 1967, Carlo Dionisotti was preparing to publish a volume destined to have
a profound impact on historiography and literary criticism: Geografia e storia
della letteratura italiana (Geography and History of Italian Literature). Borrow-
ing its title from one of the collected essays read in an abbreviated version as
an introductory lesson at Bedford College for Women, University of London,
on November 22nd, 1949, the volume was consequently published upon revi-
sion two years later. That volume demonstrated how, for a correct illustration
and analysis of Italian literary events, there must be proper attention paid not
only to history, characterized by a chronological reconstruction, but also to
geography. This is all the more true in a country long divided and character-
ized in its cultural and political events by a “profoundly and variously broken”1
landscape. Due to this preponderance of evidence, locations, for the first time,
assumed a fundamental importance in the study of literature.2
On the same trajectory that gives prominence to the “literary space”, other
scholars began to move, making explicit reference to Dionisotti or proceed-
ing autonomously on parallel courses, busy charting literary atlases. In 1997,
Franco Moretti published the Atlante del romanzo europeo (Atlas of the Euro-
pean Novel), designed to “[…] connect geography and literature - i.e. create a
geographical map of literature: for a map is precisely a relationship between a
given space and a given phenomenon”. This atlas was created by dealing with
literary geography with the two accepted meanings this approach provides for.
The first being the study of literary spaces as a largely imaginary concept: the
Paris of Comédie humaine, the Africa of colonial novels, the England of Jane
Austen. The second being the study of literature in those spaces with, in this
case, the spaces being historical and real: the peripheral libraries of Victorian
England, or the circulation of Don Quixote and the Buddenbrooks in Europe.
1 C. Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Torino, Einaudi, 1967, p. 40.
2 Obviously, the term “locations” here is not to be understood as typologically definable
spaces such as banks, cafés, cemeteries, islands, factories, etc., but as geographically deter-
minable and determined locations. For such a definition, see the landmark volume Luoghi
della letteratura italiana, Introduction and ed. by G.M. Anselmi and G. Ruozzi, Milan, Bruno
Mondadori, 2003.
© koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004501836_002