Women’s Travel Writings in Italy

Contents

Part I

Volumes 1–2

Hester Piozzi, A Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789)
Constantly shifting in register and style, Piozzi's observations continue to divide critical opinion; variously characterized as inept or experimental, acutely aware of Johnson, Reynolds and Burke, fascinated by the literary and the quotidian, Piozzi highlights the flexible and ambiguous positions and perspectives inhabited and articulated by eighteenth-century women travel writers.

Volumes 3–4

Anna Riggs, Lady Miller, Letters from Italy (1777)
Anna Riggs' Letters offer an unusually forthright and detailed account of Italy and the arts in the 1770s. Ridiculed by Horace Walpole for her poor grasp of foreign languages, Riggs's detailed, confident and knowledgeable discussion of Italian art collections nevertheless challenges a male-dominated world of connoisseurship and offers the modern reader one of the fullest demonstrations of fine art criticism in the late eighteenth century.

Part II

Volumes 5–6

Lady Morgan, Italy (1821)
Sydney Owenson's, alias Lady Morgan, travelogue is a landmark of empathy for a post- Napoleonic Italy in the throes of repression. It is full of anecdotes as well as of sweeping political statements about Italian history and society, England’s role in Restoration Europe, and her own situation as a woman traveller with Jacobin sympathies. The Quarterly Review described it as ‘a series of offences against good morals, good politics, good sense, and good taste’ and it was censured by the King of Sardinia, the Emperor of Austria, and the Pope. Nevertheless it made her famous, earning Byron’s praise for its radicalism, and was used by generations of Anglophone visitors as a stimulating guidebook.

Volume 7

Maria Graham, Three Months Passed in the Mountains East of Rome (1820)
In 1819, the Englishwoman Maria Graham spent three months in the mountains east of Rome. Already an established travel writer, Graham was keen to see parts of Italy that did not form part of the established tourist trail and to observe the local villagers whom she described as having 'manners and habits [which] savour of an older world'. Much of the book is devoted to descriptions and drawings of a troupe of local bandits whom Graham regarded as romantic heroes but who eventually drove the party back to Rome.

Volumes 8–9

Harriet Morton, Protestant Vigils, or Evening Records of a Journey in Italy (1829)
Morton gives a glimpse into the world of a middle-class English Protestant traveller in southern Europe, struggling to reconcile the architectural and artistic beauties of the scenes before her with her deeply-held anti-Catholic prejudices.

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