3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

Traveling through Europe has been an enriching experience, with its apex in the 18th and 19th century. The Grand Tour of Italy is “the most interesting of all possible voyages” wrote Abbé Gabriel-Françoise Coyer in his travel journal (1763). It was a sort of “gap year” but represented much more. It was a formative journey, where the young elite would deepen their knowledge in classical literature and refine their taste for art and architecture. It was also an immersion in the leisure that traveling offered. The phenomenon of the Grand Tour produced an immense amount of travel literature, journals, and provided a backdrop and inspiration for countless novels. It also played and defining role in constructing identity, individual and national, setting a canonical cultural path. How can we retrace part of this path through Italy through a different point of view? Introducing a less normative dominated reading of the lived experience of the Grand Tour? In this course we will (re)discover Italy in the glory of the Grand Tour golden era through the writing of women writers, the American antislavery activist Fredrick Douglass and A range of queer and other rubbles and outcast visiting Italy. In class, we will look at excerpts of texts including some by Mary Shelley, Vernon Lee, Margaret Fuller, Madame De Stäel, J.A. Symonds, Goethe, Lord Byron. We will take advantage of the great collections of art like (Waters Museum and BMA) becoming grant tourists ourselves and discuss and analyze the styles and subjects of art and architecture of Italy (mostly in Venice, Florence and Rome). We will also take advantage of the Special Collections at the Sheridan Library that houses rare books and documents that we can look closely. Every week the material will be presented in different forms, book excerpts, articles, collections, but also movies, theater pieces and music.