Cultural Experiences in Florence and Italy: The Grand Tour Narrative in the 21st Century

Birindelli, P. (2020). Cultural Experiences in Florence and Italy: The Grand Tour Narrative in the 21st Century. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 10(20), 191–205.  → LINK  

Abstract. In this article I explore various current myths that lead foreigners, especially North Europeans and North Americans, to choose to visit/live in Florence or Tuscany for a while or forever. Is it possible to discern any shared, collective representations? If so, how do such myths fit into the contemporary everyday life of the city? Can we identify a pathway from the aesthetic quest for “authentic” Italian life to cultural encounters with Italians in the flesh? My hypothesis is that one of the leitmotifs of foreigners’ experiences is a romantic, and to a lesser degree, intellectual approach towards “Florence without Florentines”. If so, there is nothing new “Under the Tuscan Sun”: the Grand Tour narrative is alive and kicking. Contemporary experiences of Florence and Tuscany continue to be shaped by the social imaginary inherited from the early nineteenth century. Travellers and sojourners come to Florence with a set of expectations shaped through filmic and literary representations and see what they expect to see, not least because the Italians are equally complicit in performing their part in this ritualised experience.

Keywords: Grand Tour; narrative; culture; travel; experience, romantic myth, Florence and Italy. 

Excerpts

THE SELF-PERPETUATING ROMANTIC PERSPECTIVE (p. 192)

There is perhaps no other city [than Florence] in which the overall impression, vividness and memory, and in which nature and culture working in unison, create in the viewer so strong an impression of a work of art, even from the most superficial point of view (George Simmel [1906] 2007: 39, emphasis mine).

One of the many acquisitions sprouting from the Renaissance cultural recast is the revolution of the human conception of space: from heaven to the landscape beyond. We might ponder this as a major shift toward anthropocentric representations in the arts (such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man) and an imaginable turning point for modern scientific thought: the “observer/observed” distinction (Francis Bacon 1620 [1889]). Or, to extend the speculation, as the beginning of the “disenchantment of the world” (Friedrich Schiller 1794 [1910]; Max Weber 1904–1905 [1930]); which is exactly the opposite of the ongoing “re-enchantment” dynamic sustaining foreigners’ experience of Florence.

I venture to formulate the hypothesis that these are not common interpretative frameworks for the typical foreigner, especially North American and North European, visiting Florence nowadays; intellectual travellers probably have other ideas in mind too. I believe, instead, that Florence ‒ Tuscany, Italy and potentially Southern Europe in general ‒ is experienced and interpreted through the eyes of Frances, the protagonist of the bestselling book and successful movie Under the Tuscan Sun. If this is the case, as I will try to argue, there is nothing new under the Tuscan sun.

THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE CITY (pp. 196–197)

If instead of Frances-Under-the-Tuscan-Sun ‒ or Elizabeth and Robert Barrett Browning, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, James Joyce, Ezra Pound18 ‒ you take as literary guide Marco Polo, the protagonist of Italo Calvino’ Invisible Cities (1972), the cultural and imaginative perspective will change a lot. Marco Polo will indeed lead you nowhere ‒ let me repeat this: nowhere!

Marco Polo in his conversation with the Kublai Khan describes 55 cities, or, better, the imaginative potential of those cities. At one point of the story Kublai Khan starts to notice that all Marco Polo’s cities look alike. Kublai interrupts Marco and asks for more precision, more adherence to reality: “Where is it? What is its name?”

Marco Polo replies: 

It has neither name nor place. I shall repeat the reason why I was describing it to you: from the number of imaginable cities we must exclude those whose elements are assembled without a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else (Calvino 1972: 43, emphasis added). 

“I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan answered, “and my dreams are composed either by my

mind or by chance.” And Marco: 

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls… You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours… Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx (Calvino 1972: 44, emphasis added). 

Italo Calvino brings back to the centre of the discourse the traveller’s self-identity, his/her biography and the subjective-existential questions posed to the visited city-country. Thus, in a certain sense, Calvino gives more autonomy and freedom to the traveller. He can get off the beaten track, paved with the city’s “seven or seventy wonders” – that is: anything that is supposed to be worth seeing – and freely ask whatever he/she wants. Nevertheless, the city (life, reality) cannot be at one’s disposal. The city has its own identity, story and autonomy. You can ask the city anything you want, but you may not receive the expected answers nor can you expect the city to mirror your narcissistic projections.

The Sphinx guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes and in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex before allowing travellers to pass she set them a riddle. Oedipus can be seen as a threshold figure not only in the transition between the old religious practices, represented by the death of the Sphinx and the rise of the new Olympian deities, but as a character in a liminal transition. The Oedipus-traveller undergoes a trial attempting to change his alien status. We could imagine the riddle as the narrative, the myth that consciously or unconsciously is guiding foreigners’ cultural explorations in Florence. The riddle needs to be unravelled in order to acquire a critical awareness of the ongoing experience of otherness.

Therefore, a critical warning is required for those attempting to experience the city in an autonomous and active way. The city-museum of Florence is probably not the best place in the world for those seeking a vital turning-point, an existential change. It is worth recalling again George Simmel’s interpretation: “Florence is the good fortune of those fully mature human beings who have achieved or renounced what is essential in life, and who for this possession or renunciation are seeking only its form” (Simmel, 1906 [2007]: 41).

References

Simmel, G. (1906 [2007]), Florence, in “Theory Culture & Society”, 24(7–8): 38–41.

Bacon, F. (1620 [1889]), Novum Organum, Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Schiller, F. (1794 [1910]), Letters upon the aesthetic education of man, Collier, New York.

Weber, M. (1904–1905 [1930]), The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, Allen & Unwin, London.

Calvino, I. (1972), Invisible cities, Harcourt, New York.