'Petit Tour’: viaggiatori e viaggiatrici in Campania alla ricerca di itinerari insoliti ed ‘esotici’ tra Sette e Ottocento

The Grand Tour travelers often loved to follow less known and more ‘wild’ itineraries. Besides the most famous artistic and natural beauty of the Italian peninsula, which have consolidated and enhanced the international reputation over the centuries, although equally fascinating places less known attracted the interest of travelers. The paper aims to analyze a ‘Petit Tour’, from the second half of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. This tour included unusual and minor routes, but certainly not less interesting of the great traditional routes. The paper intends to follow some travelers who, starting from Naples were searching for an ‘exotic’ Cilento, a green Irpinia and an ‘archaic’ Lucania. Some departed on foot from Salerno and crossed the ‘wild’ hills to the Amalfi coast. What prompted them to not follow the traditional trip? What the South tried? What stereotypes led them? What landscapes sought? Watched as the inhabitants of those places? What expressing judgments about food, about the local customs and traditions? It can detect a difference between men and women about their relationship with the visited sites? What differences highlighted between Naples and the smaller towns of Campania and Southern Italy? As the journey changed and as changed travelers between the second half of the Eighteenth and the late nineteenth century? Through careful philological analysis of terms and descriptions of visual images and the precise choice of itineraries, the essay will follow the footsteps of men and women who, through their travel accounts, allow us to study, in the long nineteenth century, some surprising aspects of the meeting of different cultures.