Travellers in the Mediterranean: Linguistic and Cultural Encounters

Preface

Charting the Mediterranean: Journeys, Narratives, Cultural Dialogues

Emanuela Ettorre and Giuliano Mion

The multifaceted experience of travel has always fascinated the human imagination. Whether through physical journeys, or through imaginary and literary adventures, the essence of travel inevitably transcends mere physical movement and encompasses a wide range of experiences and intentions. Some travel out of necessity, whether as exiles or for survival, others for exploration or tourism, and still others for trade or religious pilgrimage, or in pursuit of an ideal. The motivations behind travel are as varied and complex as the destinations themselves, often shifting and evolving during the voyage, as the traveller encounters the “other”, engages with the unfamiliar, and as a person grows and matures. What begins as a journey for exploration can therefore become a quest for self-discovery, since the foreign lands do not simply represent immersion in unknown landscapes and territories, but also the possibility of uncovering new aspects of one’s own identity. Journeys unfold at different paces: some are slow and protracted, thus allowing deep reflections and the sedimentation of discoveries; others are hasty, quick, and driven by the urgency and the thrill of movement or of new experiences.

Amid the vast taxonomy of travel possibilities, this book delves into the experience of travel around, and travel writing about the Mediterranean – a sea steeped in history, rich in culture, and full of diversity. Throughout the centuries, and in the context of literary travels, the Mediterranean has inspired an enormous number of narratives. Intellectuals and writers have long been attracted to and inspired by the ancient ruins, historical sites, and wonders of nature, which together testify to the extraordinary heterogeneity of this space – “an unstable space of variable intensities, alliances and tensions […] where the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia meet”¹. With this in mind, our exploration of the Mediterranean travels takes us on a journey through time and space, across millennia of shared histories and diverse encounters.

We do not need to trouble Fernand Braudel² or any other great historian of the Mediterranean to recall the vastness of this small sea; how limited it is in its extent, but how enormous in its richness; how (en)closed it may appear when it is seen on a map, but also how permeable are its shores, peoples, cultures, and civilisations, all often characterised by shifting frontiers. Millennia of shared history and diverse contacts have fostered the development of cultural landscapes of incredible beauty and charm, which have captivated the minds of travellers, sailors, explorers, adventurers, all of whom have sailed the waters of this sea. In the present volume, we can only offer a few examples of how the Mediterranean voyage can be “narrated” within its different forms, models, purposes, and destinations. No collection of essays could ever be exhaustive; it is not possible to do justice to the long history of this sea, with its peoples, conquests, and losses. Thus, whilst our selection may appear fragmentary and partial, its very lack of any claim to completeness serves as a testament to the enduring appeal and the extreme complexity of the Mediterranean travel.

Spanning travels from the nineteenth century to today, the contributions in this volume offer crucial insights into cultural encounters, practices and perceptions as travellers have experienced and still experience them in the Mediterranean regions. Through an investigation of travelogues, diaries, letters, novels, poems, tourist guides, and blogs, the authors of this collection navigate the intricate relationship between Self and Other; they contribute to a wider understanding of travel, and writing about travel, in mediating cultural exchange, while shedding light on the major challenges posed by stereotypes and socio-cultural bias. In terms of its geographical scope, this volume gathers contributions covering a substantial part of the Mediterranean area, with reference to specific regions and countries such as Greece, Sicily, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Within the ten chapters of the volume, five contributions (by Emanuela Ettorre, Carlo Martinez, Adrian Tait, Silvia Antosa, Paola Partenza) deal with the British and American travellers who reached the coasts of the Mediterranean from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1970s; one contribution (by Lorella Martinelli) can be ascribed to the French cultural area and the literary genre of poetry. Two other chapters (by Lorenzo Buonvivere and Antonio Gurrieri) set aside hodeporic literature in order to investigate tourist discourse and language practice in the Mediterranean. Two final contributions (by Miriam Al Tawil and Elisa Gugliotta) touch the Arab world more deeply, one dealing with the Middle East in the nineteenth century, and the other with contemporary North Africa. Apart from the final chapter, the predominant point of view offered in this volume is that of the Westerner traveller venturing into exotic lands, discovering “oddities” and new customs. These oddities can indeed be interpreted as manifestations of an orientalist perspective, a phenomenon extensively explored by Edward Said and numerous other scholars since³.

In the first chapter Emanuela Ettorre investigates the kind of “philhellenic sentiment”⁴ that was widespread among British travellers. Her analysis focuses on George Gissing’s travel experiences to Greece and their profound impact of his sense of identity and exile. Through an investigation of Gissing’s autobiographical writings and of his short novel Sleeping Fires, this chapter reveals Gissing’s constant oscillation between his idealised view of the Mediterranean, derived from classical literature, and his disillusionment with the realities of industrial modernity. Thus, Ettorre explores how Gissing’s experiences in Greece challenged his romanticised notions of the classical world, revealing the ecological consequences of industrialisation and the need to reassess literary portrayals of nature in the context of environmental degradation. Interestingly, Gissing’s representation of Greece oscillates between admiration of natural wonders and an unambiguous disdain for the backwardness of its social systems and the commonness of its populace. A close reading of Gissing’s writings therefore emphasises his ethnocentric biases, and within him, a clear struggle to reconcile his English identity with the foreign territories he encounters. By delving into Gissing’s sense of identity, exile, and the illusion of a nostalgic past, this chapter uncovers the intricate layers of his self-divided imagination and the profound impact of his Mediterranean travels on his literary production and psyche.

Chapter II moves us into the Mediterranean in American literature between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Here, Carlo Martinez analyses the emergence of mass tourism and its transformation into a powerful economic force and a major cultural form itself characteristic of modernity. The Mediterranean has always had a key role in the American imagination for its association with history, culture, and high art. Starting in the nineteenth century, however, it also became a popular tourist destination. Through a discussion of four travelogues (both well known and overlooked) by Nathaniel Parker Willis, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton and Samuel Gamble Bayne, this chapter reconstructs the manifold meanings that the popularised image of the cruise in the Mediterranean played in the American imagination in the second half of the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth century.

Adrian Tait’s contribution, in Chapter III, leads the reader into the Arab culture through the eyes of two British women travellers, Marianne Brocklehurst and Mary Booth or “MBs”, and their journey through the Nile. Marianne wrote her own account of the trip she made there in 1873, a diary never intended for publication; by turns picaresque, picturesque, and elegiac, it provides an intimate counterpart to Amelia Edwards’s Nile travelogue. Inadvertently, it also reveals the seemingly innocuous way in which British travellers constructed the exotic otherness of the Orient, reducing the intricate realities of a modernising nation to an “Eastern spectacle”. For the two travellers, the Arab peoples they encountered were simply “specimens” of this strangeness, and variously “savage”, “strange”, or “wild”; the scenery was only ever “picturesque” or “pretty”; and Egypt itself was invariably an “Old World”, whose antiquities were there to be appropriated by the new, and whose wildlife was there to be shot at and “bagged”. As they continued with their journey, however, Marianne’s diary suggests a deepening interest in the people they meet and the places they visit, and a growing recognition that trips such as these were not without consequence: even as she negotiated for illicit artefacts, Marianne pronounced it “abominable” that visiting British travellers had carved their names in “temples and tombs”. As this chapter discusses, the MB’s Nile trip marks the beginning of their deep and life-long enthusiasm for Egypt and its history. In turn, a close reading of Marianne’s diary deepens our understanding of these two remarkable travellers, and of Victorian travellers in general, whilst also underlining the way in which Western visitors mapped their own, reductive notions of cultural superiority on to the rich complexity of contemporary life along the Nile.

In reimagining the Mediterranean through the lens of Vita Sackville West’s novel Challenge (1924), Silvia Antosa explores the intersections of geography and identity in literary narratives. Significantly, and as Chapter IV explains, Challenge is set in the fictional Greek city of Herakleion, which is inspired by Monte Carlo, and whose representation reflects the complex dynamics of a cosmopolitan community. The protagonist, Julian Davenport, grapples with his family’s colonial legacy and his own identity as he navigates political intrigues and personal relationships. Through Julian’s journey, Sackville West challenges stereotypes and taboos about sexuality, gender and power, and offers a subtle exploration of the paradigms of love and desire set against a backdrop of societal expectations and personal struggles. Antosa brilliantly succeeds in examining the complex interplay of travel and subversion in Modernist women’s writing, while focusing on Sackville-West’s portrayal of the Mediterranean as a realm of possibilities for exploring sexuality and desire. While celebrating the liberating potential of the Mediterranean, Antosa argues that Sackville-West’s novel also reflects and reinforces stereotypes related to nationality, class and gender, thus revealing an unresolved tension between subversion and tradition.

In Chapter V, Paola Partenza analyses Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book Mani. Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958), which celebrates the landscape of the Peloponnese region with its mountains, hills, and archaeological sites. Mani offers a nuanced portrayal of Greek culture, blending archaeological and ethnographic perspectives to illuminate both the past and the present. The narrative is brought to life through detailed descriptions and insightful commentary, which encompass the people, customs, and landscapes of Greece. Fermor reveals the complexities of Greek society, from social hierarchies to ritual integration, to identify the essence of Greek culture spanning antiquity to modernity. This work not only documents Fermor’s journey, but also extends an invitation for readers to explore their own connections to Greek history and culture. The chapter follows Fermor’s footsteps, embracing memories, interactions, and first-hand experiences to reconstruct a vivid and accurate portrait of Mani. It emphasises the enduring role of travel as a crossroads of diverse cultures and customs, in line with Foucault’s notion that experience offers a gateway to the collective memory of humanity.

In Chapter VI, Lorella Martinelli investigates the portrayal of Italy in the poetry of Tristan Corbière (1845–1875), focusing particularly on his Italian cycle within the collection Amours jaunes. By analysing Corbière’s ironic collage of Italian clichés, Martinelli identifies the subversion of the traditional iconography of the Grand Tour. Thus, Corbière’s poetic journey through Italy is characterised by an ironic and exaggerated depiction of the country, in sharp contrast with the idealised views offered by earlier French travellers. The Bel Paese no longer represents a sunny, primitive, and seductive place, and what the selected poems highlight is Corbierè’s distinctive and provocative poetic style, a critical engagement with cultural stereotypes, and his exploration of the grotesque, macabre, and comedic aspects of Italian landscapes and characters.

In Chapter VII, Lorenzo Buonvivere offers a completely different perspective by analysing the specialised field of tourism communication, and looking at one of its most recent and relevant forms: ecotourism, defined as a type of sustainable travel to natural areas which preserves the environment and supports local communities. Given the persuasive function of metaphors in general tourism discourse, this chapter seeks to understand whether figurative language employed in the sub-field of ecotourism plays a role in the positive/negative conceptualisation of the relationship between humans and non-humans. It investigates a corpus of nine guides produced within the EU-funded EMbleMatiC Project (2015–2019), a project which led to the creation and advertising of “eco-itineraries” across the mountainous regions of the Mediterranean. The research refers to Conceptual Metaphor Theory in order to select recurrent metaphorical expressions that target nature in the texts. Results show that nature is consistently portrayed figuratively in terms of war, art, guardianship, competition, as well as human body, character and emotion. The analysis suggests that some expressions are peculiar to ecotourism discourse, and indeed participate in the recognition of nature’s salience and human dependence on it. However, findings also reveal a consistency with general tourism discourse, so that metaphors in ecotourism texts mainly fulfil a persuasive function to increase the perceived value of the destinations advertised. The chapter concludes by advocating for an exploitation of the educational role of metaphors, which might reconcile the economic character of ecotourism with its ethical objectives.