MISCELLANEA GEOGRAPHICA – REGIONAL STUDIES ON DEVELOPMENT Vol. 23 • No. 3 • 2019 • pp. 163-172 • ISSN: 2084-6118 • DOI: 10.2478/mgrsd-2019-0007 The journey of C.T. Ramage through the Cilento in the first half of the nineteenth century, between geography and history of an ‘unknown’ land Abstract Many travelers-writers have described the characteristics of the areas Silvia Siniscalchi visited from a critical point of view, with wit and sense of observation. One of the most significant and unknown works concerning this literary current is the tale of the trip from Paestum to Policastro made in 1828 by C.T. Ramage: his sketchbooks are not only a description of the evidence Department of Humanistic Studies of the past and of the archaeological remains of the Ancient Greece, but University of Salerno, Italy a small geo-history of the Cilento (shortly before its insurrection of that e-mail:
[email protected] same year), as the first stage of a journey that returns a fresco of the South of Italy as it was before the process of Italian unification, respect to its agricultural landscapes, customs and dietary habits, attitudes, superstitions, society, culture, religious and political affairs, comparable with the present context of the same territories. Keywords Perceptions • representations • narratives • travels Received: 16 November 2018 © University of Warsaw – Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies Accepted: 24 January 2019 Introduction “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants”: so wrote work the fundamental parts of a geo-historical process, whose Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century (Metalogicon, III, 4). consequences are discernible today, are evident in the critical That’s a metaphor which intends to express the dependence points of Southern Italy, and of Cilento in particular, according of the modern culture on the ancient, and it’s very adequate for to the same dynamics which were already widely and effectively the rediscovery of the important knowledge assets of the Grand described two hundred years ago.