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DE INVENTIO SARDINIÆ THE IDEA OF SARDINIA IN HISTORICAL AND TRAVEL WRITING 1780-1955 Sandro Corso PhD – College of Humanities and Social Sciences THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 2010 Edinburgh, 27th December, 2010 This is to declare that the thesis herewith bound, being my own work, has been composed by myself and has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Sandro Corso 2 ABSTRACT This thesis investigates the way the national identity of Sardinia was perceived in travel literature – and more particularly the way writing about travel experiences contributed to shape identity, both of the visited place and of its inhabitants. The thesis draws from different sources (travelogues, belles lettres, history books); the work reflects therefore a rather eclectic panorama. For obvious reasons the research field has been circumscribed in time and space, but , but aims at drawing general conclusions, i.e. assessing whether national identities are the result of an endogenous process, or rather are influenced by exogenous elaborations. As regards geographical delimitation we restricted our inquiry to the island of Sardinia for two main reasons: i) it is isolated not only geographically but also culturally and has never been a conventional destination along the Grand Tour routes; ii) up to the first half of the twentieth century the island had a reputation for being an “unknown” or “forgotten” land. As regards time, the choice was to concentrate on modern times, that is approximately between the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 20th century. Thereafter, the coming of the post-industrial society, mass tourism, faster means of transport, the standardizing effect of globalization changed the idea of travelling, leading some to argue that the birth of post-modern tourism implied the end of travel, or at least a totally new attitude towards travel, that has been defined post-modern. When D.H. Lawrence wrote that Sardinia had “no history, no date, no race, no offering” he was drawing from a consolidated image of the island as an unknown land rather than on its millenary history. The Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda challenged this idea in the first quarter of the 20th century by countering the codes elaborated in the island – namely the language code, the common law and the rustic life and passions – to the civilized way of life of industrialized European societies. The thesis concludes that the making of the identity of Sardinia was the result of the interaction between these two views. 3 CONTENTS Introduction The corpus: general criteria…………………………………… 5 Defining travel…………………………………….......…………. 7 Understanding travel in literature……………………..…………. 9 Travel in literature: the quest for identity……………..…………. 15 Questions of method…………………………………..…………. 23 Chapter 1 How Sardinia became “unknown” to Europe………………… 30 1.1. Early maps of Sardinia……...……………………………………. 30 1.2. Pierre D’Avity and his translator (E.Grimeston)……... ………… 34 1.3. Philipp Clüver……………………………………………………. 37 Chapter 2 The discovery of Sardinia: 19th century travellers…………. 42 2.1. British travellers…………………………………………………. 43 2.1.1. John Galt…………………………………………………………. 44 2.1.2. William Henry Smyth……………………………………………. 47 2.1.3. John Warre Tyndale…………………………………...…………. 53 2.1.4. Robert Tennant………………………………………..…………. 55 2.1.5. Thomas Forester…………………………………………………. 57 2.1.6. Two British women travel writers: Mrs Gretton and Mary Davey 60 2.2. German travellers…………………………………….………….. 65 2.2.1. Joseph Fuos………………………………………………………. 68 2.2.2. J.D.F.Neigebaur………………………………………..………… 74 2.2.3. Heinrich von Maltzan……….………………………...…………. 78 2.3. French travellers…………….……………………….………….. 85 2.3.1. Antoine Claude Pasquin Valery………………………………….. 87 2.3.2. Honoré de Balzac……………….…….………………………….. 90 2.3.3. Gustave Jourdan………………………………………………….. 94 2.3.4. Emmanuel Domenech………………………………..…………... 97 2.3.5. Eugene Roissard de Bellet……………………………………….. 101 2.3.6. Gaston Vuiller ………………………………………..………….. 103 2.4. Italian travellers…………………………………….........………….. 109 2.4.1. Alberto Della Marmora……………………………….………….. 111 2.4.2. Antonio Bresciani …………………………………….…………. 117 2.4.3. Paolo Mantegazza …………………………………….…………. 122 2.4.4. Carlo Corbetta ………………………………………..…………. 124 Chapter 3 Primitivism and the (re)invention of Sardinia: travellers in the first half of the 20th century………………………………… 128 3.1. A. Steinitzer, K. Baedeker, M.L. Wagner, J.E.C. Flitch, D. Goldring, M. Le Lannou….………………………….…………… 128 3.2. Grazia Deledda: the (re)invention of the Sardinian identity from the inside …………………………………………………………. 138 3.3. The European (re)invention of the Sardinian identity from the outside……………………………………………………………………. 147 3.3.1. D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia……………………. …………... 148 3.3.2. E.Vittorini’s Sardegna come un infanzia……………...…………… 162 3.3.3.. E.Jünger’s Am Sarazenenturm …………………………………… 170 Conclusions …………………………………………………………………….. 178 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………….. 181 4 INTRODUCTION The corpus: general criteria More than a concept which is objectively definable, identity – both of a place and a national community, and even a person – tends to be assimilated to an image and appears to be closer to myth than fact. Although it may appear obvious to all of us that we know what we are like, and the general characteristics of the people around us – in psychological terms as well as in terms of nationality – the perception of (national) identity varies considerably with the changing of an observer’s point of view – both in terms of personal and cultural attitudes. As a provisional definition, identity appears to be the result of a complex dynamic between the inner characteristics of a person and the more or less stereotyped image others have of him/her. The two perceived identities may be strikingly different. This work studies the perception of (national) identity through travel literature, and in particular the way in which writing about travel experiences contributed to shape identity, both of the visited place and of its inhabitants; and aims at assessing whether national identities are the result of an endogenous process, or rather are influenced by exogenous elaborations. As the subject of the search appeared from the very beginning too wide, the research field had obviously to be circumscribed in time and space, and the study perspective needed to be delimitated and clarified. As regards geographical delimitation we decided to circumscribe our inquiry to the island of Sardinia, for two main reasons: i) it is isolated not only geographically but also culturally, it has never been a conventional destination along the Grand Tour routes, and although in modern times has been part of Italy, it has preserved a specific language and cultural identity; ii) up to the first half of the twentieth century the island had a reputation for being an “unknown” or “forgotten” land. For these reasons it was thought to be an ideal object of study – bearing in mind throughout that the conclusions would be of a more general interest and would allow us to give them more general significance. 5 As regards time, the choice was to concentrate on modern times, that is between the second half of the eighteenth century – when, by general consent, travelling south following the Grand Tour itineraries had became a radically different phenomenon in Western culture because of the wider presence of the middle-classes and women – and the first half of the twentieth century. Thereafter, the coming of the post- industrial society, mass tourism, faster means of transport, and finally the standardizing effect of globalization changed the idea of travelling. Some argue that the coming of faster means of transport and globalized mass tourism led to the death of travel, or at least to a totally new attitude towards travel – I accept Kaplan’s [1996] view that travel, too, is to be considered post-modern. The post-modern traveller (an example could be Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, 1987) is likely to experience that even the remotest corners of the world have been contaminated by Western civilization. Quite obviously, the concept of ‘travel’ varies considerably depending on the culture and time in which it is contextualized; it should therefore be made clear that our understanding of the word ‘travel’ will forcibly be Eurocentric, that is charged with the meanings the word has acquired within the spatial and cultural horizon of Europe. Even before I started reading systematically we had to face a fundamental problem: the choice of our corpus. The problem obviously comes from the variety of definitions given to travel literature, which depending on the scholar can be a synonym of travel writing