Lucca nello specchio della letteratura, 1591-2018
- hugo2825
- 26. Jan.
- 2 Min. Lesezeit
At least since the late sixteenth century, Lucca has always shown a strong interest in literature.
This study offers a selection of German, English, and American authors who chose Lucca either as a travel destination or as the setting for their narratives. From the accounts of English travellers who visited the city in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the German writers who described it between the Enlightenment and Romanticism; from a twentieth-century romance novel to a historical novel; from a crime story involving a murder to a twenty-first-century detective tale, Hugo Schwaller embraces five centuries of literary perspectives on the city of Lucca in a rich and varied gallery.
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It is a study of cultural transfer. How did visitors to Lucca and numerous other places in Italy, documented from earliest times to the present day, experience the city and how did they depict these experiences in their works?
Starting with the English hiking phenomenon Fynes Moryson, who in the 1590s twice walked and rode from London to Constantinople and back, first writing down his experiences in a two-thousand-page small-print report - as a member of the educated gentry, first in Latin! - and then translating this Latin report into English.
Next, we have the polymath John Ray from Essex, naturalist, theologian, clergyman and classical scholar, who traveled to Malta and back in the 17th century for the purpose of botanical studies.
Then there's Goethe's self-righteous father; Eichendorff's Lucca fairy tale from the Romantic era; Heinrich Heine's critical to biting studies on Lucca; the pulp fiction of billionaire author Barbara Cartland; Constanze Wilken's profoundly researched, insightful historical novel; and two crime novels, also from more recent times.
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