Geographies of Belonging: Italian Travel Writing and Italian Identity in the Age of Early European Tourism‪.‬

The waning of the Renaissance brought about a drastic shift in Italy's prestige. Just as Italy lost its envied position at the forefront of European culture, Italian urban centers became the favored destinations of rapidly spreading aristocratic tourism. In this new era of codified travel, Italians had to adapt both to the peninsula's relegation to the geographical, political, and economic edges of the continent and to their new role in the European imaginary as the designated hosts to travelers from the north. (1) Those Italians who chose to leave the peninsula inevitably went countercurrent to throngs of southbound European aristocrats and found themselves in an ambiguous position: they were unquestionably European in their heritage but, because there existed no cohesive form of "Italian" travel, excluded as a group from general European travel patterns. The lack of an "Italian" culture of travel had significant repercussions in this period because mobility had become a key element in burgeoning notions of national and even European identity. New models of cultural belonging and prominence now involved larger geo-political territories having one principal cultural center and defined in part by the international mobility and influence of their inhabitants and institutions. As Gerard Delanty points out,