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These two massive volumes that explore the history of the voyage in Italy, strike one as a lifetime of research and scholarship. Emanuele Kanceff's collection of studies is designed to show how much the topic of the voyage in Italy has become a theme of European literature in general. The factual evidence displayed in this anthology of studies exploring the history of the voyage in Italy between the end of Classicism and the end of Romanticism is part of a more comprehensive "reality" of literature: there is barely any other country in Europe to have inspired to such a large extent the canonization of a literary genre. An important thesis of his studies, which Kanceff emphasizes repeatedly, is that, contrary to what it has usually been argued, the voyagers' Italy is not a discovery of Romanticism. In fact, Italy has continually been rediscovered, especially by modern historiography, as a geographic space that literally and figuratively represents a bridge between the classical and the modern worlds.
Poliopticon Italiano comprises five chapters and an appendix. With the exception of the first one (Prospettive Critiche), the chapters are structures around the main documents left to us by historians and writers who travelled to Italy from the eighteenth century on.
A student of Franco Simone and, later, Angiolo Tursi (to the latter, Emanuele Kanceff dedicates two separate studies), the author argues against those historians who have claimed that only Romanticism inaugurated "l'unico, vero viaggio in Italia." To argue for his defence of the precedence of the classical perspective, Kanceff presents in chapter II (Bouchardiana) the case of Jean-Jacques Bouchard, the French author of a Voyage de Paris à Rome. Author of a pre-Rousseauist book of Confessions, Bouchard, once in Rome, changed his touristic identity for that of a dedicated chronographer, and began tackling the huge mass of Vatican library documents concerning the Antiquity.
As a rule, the method used by Kanceff is the linking of geography to literature and the arts; Goethe, Liszt, Stendhal, Nerval, Gabriel Faure, and other French and German travellers are among the celebrities for whom Italy has always been an long-lasting topic of description and reflection. On the other hand, the identification with the Italian space and, in most of the cases, with a particular region, responds to an ontological question raised by a book of studies on voyage: how "Italian" is the Italy seen by the artistic imagination of someone like Goethe or Liszt? Kanceff seems to argue for a more "human" understanding of the genre itself; travelling can be a profession before it becomes grounds for literary writing, as the latter plays the role of a recording tape of the former. It is not difficult to read this statement as Kanceff's own methodological option. His studies in the Poliopticon display a disposition to look at documents with sociological and anthropological bend. What attracted Goethe to Sicily was the island's load of Classical Greek traces, together with what he perceived as the possibility to witness space in its mythical unfolding. Past becomes present, and Goethe, imagining himself as Odysseus, reacts like a Schliemann avant la lettre. This example alone shows how much the genre of travel diaries that was brought about by Enlightenment writers, has spoken, before Foucault, of an "archeology of knowledge." Journeys transform literature into human knowledge ("cosa umana," as Boccaccio would say), whenever imagination touches land. From Stendhal's decision to have engraved on his tomb his "elective affinities" with Milan, to Liszt's aesthetic perception filtered through Goethe's, Italy has remained a place in which the subject (Romantic or not) regains itself. Goethe, again, gives the standard description of Italy as the locus amoenus, the new Promised Land: for him, Italy is not merely a country to visit, it is the ultimate goal and the true spiritual source of the creative mind. Echoing Goethe's words, Liszt, like Gide, goes to Italy "exilé par sa propre volonté," perhaps the only positive form of exile one may think of.
Eventually, the collection of studies proposed by Kanceff does not offer a formalist perspective on the genre, as it is rather concerned with collecting as much evidence as possible for a "storia della civiltà comparata." This is, along with a very comprehensive bibliography, the main virtue of any historiographycal approach and, consequently, of this Poliopticon.
Florin Berindeanu
University of Georgia, Athens