Naples as a literary place: Tourism and cultural entrepreneurship

This article examines the articulation of a ‘poetics of place’ as found specifically in essays and prefaces by the Sicilian writers Gesualdo Bufalino and Vincenzo Consolo. It places both authors within a tradition of writing about Sicily, a tradition which is, it has been argued, ‘citationary’ and intertextual. It then outlines the three principal techniques the authors use to construct a particular rhetorical discourse of the Sicilian place, which entwines texts and landscape in a particular manner: they create literary cartographies and topographies of Sicily, they describe and recuperate past landscapes through citations of canonical Sicilian texts, and they use figures and metaphors which unite the material and the symbolic, with the effect of positioning their own texts as monuments to a disappearing place. Finally, the article discusses the relation between this prefatorial production and the status of its authors as intellectuals within the Sicilian context

This paper looks at the inter-relations between heritage, cultural production and the creation and management of a "glocal" image of the territory. To explore these processes I have chosen the city of Napoli as my observatory. Among the various "cities of art", Napoli can boast some extraordinary "bonuses" such as a remarkable natural setting and all the resources of a seaside resort, as well as a particularly powerful and complex local image. My remarks are the outcome of research carried out with Maria Immacolata Simeon in the context of the activities of IRAT-CNR-Napoli, and my own work on the Neapolitan cultural industries. This paper reflects my general approach to the "cultural industry" as a complex system (Stazio 2007ab).

Journal of Human Ecology, 2013

The post-NRF phase of KZN Literary Tourism in South Africa has seen the development of a number of literary trails throughout the province, funded by area-based municipalities and the National Arts Council of the country. Those supported by the local municipalities also include a community guide training component which strengthens considerably the community outreach component of the project. To date seven literary tra ils have been compiled and printed: two on stand-alone authors who are both linked to exiting tourist sites in KZN, with the rest being smaller area-based (writer) trails. A literary trail in essence, 'links' sites together and is inevitably a construct: in effect, a strung together narrative linking places sequentially in an environment which may in fact have had a far less seamless coexistence with the writer. This paper moves from a discussion of literary tourism, to the concept of literary tourism sites and projects in the KZN province in South Africa, to a discussion of the literary trail in Rome, Italy. It does this however, by presenting an insider view on 'experiencing of the trail' by a South African tourist.

Italian Studies, 2007

The growing historiography on the construction of the stereotype of the South in the history of modern Italy has exposed its persistence in the character of the lazzaroni of Naples and its elaboration in Grand Tour accounts of Naples in the late eighteenth century. This article demonstrates that, despite this ethnographic interest in the popular culture of the streets of the city, travellers were unable to escape existing stereotypes of the Neapolitan in their descriptions and, in fact, strengthened them by creating an urban stereotype of the picturesque which survives into the modern period.

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2015

The paper aims at analysing the connections between film-induced tourism, city-branding and place-based image through the case-study of Naples, particularly deepening the role played by urban policies not only in promoting or sustaining but also in refusing some specific city's representations. In the first part we will explore this relationship focusing the attention on the changing representations of the city in films and on the changes produced by the urban policies carried out in the phase of so-called Neapolitan Renaissance. The second part will be dedicated to deepen the link between the images of the city conveyed by the media and the touristic sector, emphasizing the role of the official representations and of the Campania Region Film Commission. The third part of the paper will focus on the conflicts involving the urban actors about the existence of a potential link between some negative representations of the periodical crisis of the city (for garbage, organized crime and difficulties in the administrative management) and tourist flows. We will argue that the duplicity of representations proposes in a new way the traditional dual image of the Neapolitan cityscape, inspiring by a different notion of "authenticity".

1996

“An Italian Literary History of Travel.” Annali D'Italianistica, vol. 14, 1996, pp. 55–64.

The Historical Review/La Revue Historique, 2011

2010

This paper makes an inquiry into the ways in which various social, cultural and political groups in the present-day Italy create, express and recast their historical self-image in the medium of belles-lettres. In the conflict-ridden Italy of the last 30 years, historical fiction has been actively generating a complexly structured historical consciousness oscillating between nostalgic reconstructions of the collective past on the one hand, and its future-oriented retroception, on the other. The insights into the socio-political function of belles-lettres offered therein are discussed within a larger framework of the present-day sociopsychological and cultural theory with a particular focus on the respective roles of normative prescription and reconstructive postscription in the processes of identity construction and politics.

Forum Italicum, 2023

This article examines Italian ghetto stories, which are distinguished by confusions of time, continuities, tourism, reflections on collective identities, and movements in and out, in order to outline one potential literary history. In contrast to German-language and Anglophone literary ghettos, Italian ones are generally absent as a critical category from literary debates, though they appear in works by

Quaderni D Italianistica, 2021

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Journal of Electronic Antiquity, vol.11, no.1, 2010

This chapter delves into the production and transmission of Italian literary objects, examining their crucial role in constructing and perpetuating Italian identity. By exploring the creation, dissemination, and consumption of Italy as a trope, it highlights the dynamic interplay between material and symbolic aspects of cultural production. The chapter investigates books as carriers of Italian culture, the impact of digital media on literary transmission, and the influence of academia on the perception and teaching of Italian literature. It underscores the enduring power of stories to shape societies and give purpose to identities. Through an overview of the Italian case, supplemented by a thorough theoretical framework, the chapter illustrates how Italian literary objects have been stabilised, circulated, and continuously recast on a range of core expectations. This analysis provides a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms that have sustained and transformed the Italian literary canon in a global context, ultimately defining Italy itself and the life story it embodies as a grand narrative and cultural artefact. PRECOPY-EDITED VERSION-chapter forthcoming in Stefano Jossa (ed), Oxford Handbook of Italian Literature, Oxford University Press.

1998

This thesis aims to highlight the presence of a large and varied production of contemporary Italian travel writing and to analyse the reasons for its 'invisibility' in the Italian literary system and critical tradition. Through the use of a comparative approach to genre and of current theories developed in the area of Translation Studies, the thesis will outline the different status attributed to travel writing in the Anglo-American and the Italian literary systems. Such a comparative approach allows the study to escape the narrow confines of a perspective based on the idea of national literature and to adopt a wider view, which, in turn, highlights the presence of phenomena otherwise easily overlooked or discarded as insignificant. The peculiar characteristics of travel writing, a genre mostly based on the representation of the Other for a home audience, are also analysed in order to point out their affinity with translation practices and, ultimately, to underline the 'double translation' implied by translated travel writing. The case studies which make up the remaining part of the thesis are intended to illustrate different aspects of the genre of travel writing; to provide scope for an analysis of its boundaries and connections with other genres (ranging from ethnography to autobiography, from journalism to fiction, from the essay to the novel); and to illustrate the way in which generic expectations influence both the selection of texts for translation and the strategies adopted when translating and marketing them for a new audience. The writings of twentieth-century Italian explorers to Tibet, and their translations into English, constitute a significant case of adaptation of foreign texts to the needs and expectations of a British audience (and to the British interests in the geographical area concerned). The works of Oriana Fallaci and their different reception in Italy with respect to the UK and the USA illustrate the way in which personal biography and generic choices can intersect, determining both the popular image and the critical success of an author and of her work. Calvino's choice to sublimate the genre of travel writing in the stylized fiction of Le citta invisibili is treated as an example of the way in which a text which is meant to provide an escape from a low-status genre can become an icon of that same genre once it is translated and read in a different cultural context. Finally, the case of Claudio Magris's Danubio and of its English-language translation provides evidence of the complex network of literary references which marks the reception of a text in different cultures, and of the way in which generic affiliation can both promote the recognition of a 'marginal' text and constrain its more idiosyncratic (and original) characteristics.

Italian Studies, 2020

The article opens by considering how contemporary Italian Studies scholarship is situated in relation to the long-standing dominance of literary culture as a major disciplinary concern, and the persistence of traditionally conceived canons, questions, and methods. The authors discuss how the scope of literary research has expanded in recent years and become more enmeshed with sociological, political, and ideological enquiry. They review how previous definitions of literary cultures and practices have been refreshed with new theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, and through transnational dialogues and collaborative modes of research. A diachronic survey discusses key innovations both in the study of canonical or 'high culture' literary phenomenasuch as Dante, Leopardi, or Futurism -, and in engagements with previously overlooked writing in popular genres or media, or by socially marginalised authors. It concludes by reflecting on how literary studies is both critiqued and defended within current debates over the standing of humanities research within and beyond the academy.

What sorts of images and narratives of cosmopolitanism are circulating in our cultural discourse? Stories and ideas based on experiences of migration, travel, and exile are considered in relation to the Italian city of Naples, to propose an example of “South-centric” cosmopolitanism. Two different journeys in the Mediterranean, as narrated by Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun and by Neapolitan film director Vincenzo Marra, engage with the experience of travel through stories that in opposite directions—the first from North Africa to Naples, and the second from Naples to North Africa—cross territories and lines of logic of Northern and Southern boundaries and deal with notions of belonging and homecoming. Keywords: South-South Migration; Nomadic Identity; Memory; Naples; Mediterranean