Swedish Images of Italy: Travel Literature in the Age of Liberty
A period as guest researcher at the Swedish Institute in Rome allows me to further develop my project on Swedish travelogues from Italy during the Age of Liberty (1719-1772).
To combine research and teaching is an important prerequisite to develop the orientation and configuration of teaching. Given the importance of travel literature for the development of the novel in the eighteenth century my research in Rome will directly benefit my students at Umeå University. My stay as guest researcher at the Swedish Institute will thus result in a strengthening of both teaching and research on early modern literature in Umeå.
During this period, I will carry out archival- and library research in Rome and Italy in order to contextualise and compare the information provided by Swedish travellers in their writings. I will also write two additional chapters in my monograph on the subject.
My stay will give an important contribution to research on Swedish-Italian cultural relations during the eighteenth century. My participation in the educational activities of the institute – both in the Art history course and in a series of seminars on eighteenth-century antiquity reception – strengthens its courses and seminars by adding an analysis of the important literary and cultural contacts between Sweden and Italy in the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries to the institute s core archaeology and art history curriculum.
Final report
Aims and development of the project
The purpose of this project has been to shed light on the representation of the foreign in the writings of Swedish travellers to the Italian peninsula in the first half of the eighteenth century. In my examination of travel literature from the Age of Freedom (Frihetstiden, 1719-1772), I have focused on how the travellers express in their writings their appropriation of or dissociation from Italian culture and society. The project, which will result in a monograph, thus contributes to an enriched understanding of the cultural relations between Sweden and the Italian states during the Age of Freedom.
During my six-month stay at the Swedish Institute in Rome (January to June 2022), I both completed my collection of sources and progressed considerably in the writing of the monograph. Approximately two-thirds of the book have been written, with an anticipated completion of the full manuscript in 2023. In the beginning of 2024, I will be able to submit the typescript for consideration and contracting to a leading international publisher. Additionally, during my research period in Rome, I presented my results in various academic environments both in Italy and in Sweden (please see the list of lectures below). Through the diverse contexts in which the work was presented, I have thus actively contributed to the dissemination of the project’s results both within and outside academia.
The collection of sources and writing of the monograph is a direct continuation of my previous research on early modern travel literature on which I have already published extensively (see the list of publications), without, however, any overlap with prior research projects.
Project execution
In the spring I had the opportunity to carry out and finalize extensive archival research which I initially began some years ago. The project largely consists of primary research based on hitherto unstudied and mainly unpublished archive and library sources. I had previously focused my work on Swedish archives and libraries – such as Uppsala University Library’s collection of travel writings as well as private archives preserved at the National Archives (among others the Bergshamra and Tessinska collection) and the archives of the Royal Academy of Arts. Therefore, during my stay in Italy, I was able to compare and contextualize these sources with those available in Italian collections and archival holdings regarding Swedish travellers in the first half of the eighteenth century.
In particular, the writings of three Swedish travellers have been closely examined alongside the extant information in Italian archives and libraries. These are: Georg Fröman’s (d. 1767) “Anteckningar av onämnd från en resa 1755-56 till Italien” (Uppsala University Library, X 290 ba:2); Carl Tersmeden’s (1715-1797) extensive memoirs (fourteen volumes held in private estate records); and the Roman senator Nils Bielke’s (1706-1765) correspondence with his wife Hedvig Elisabeth Sack and his brother-in-law Carl Gustav Tessin (1695-1770), to be found in the National Archives in Stockholm. I have compared and contrasted the accounts of the Italian states provided in these three authors’ travelogues with information in, indicatively, Archivio di Stato di Genova, Archivio di Stato and Archivio Storico Municipale (Naples), Biblioteca Apostolica and Archivio Segreto (Vatican State), Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Hertziana (Rome), and Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Venice). The investigation of the traces left by the Swedish travellers in Italian archives and libraries constitutes an essential mapping of their presence in the country, as well as a requisite complementation of their responses to the cultural, political, religious and social development of the Italian peninsula.
While completing the collection of sources, I have also continued to write the monograph. This focuses primarily on three Italian states in the early eighteenth century: a republic, Genoa (Repubblica di Genova); a monarchy, Naples (Regno delle due Sicilie); and a theocracy, the Papal States. The book develops an analysis of these pre-modern Italian states in three dedicated chapters entitled “Identity”, “Place” and “Time” respectively. An introductory and a concluding chapter complete the monograph. The first two chapters were written during the spring of 2022; in the autumn I have continued with the preparation of the third chapter.
The three most important results of the project
The most important results from the investigation I carried out in the spring of 2022 at the Swedish Institute in Rome can be summarized thus:
1. The collection, completion and contextualization of archive and library sources regarding Swedish travels to Italy in the Age of Freedom;
2. The writing of approximately two-thirds of the monograph on the subject;
3. The continuous presentation of my research results both within and outside of academia in a series of invited talks.
Conclusions of the project
Several of the project’s emerging insights regarding Swedish travels to Italy during the Age of Freedom have been achieved through the cross-fertilization of the three main categories to which a chapter is respectively assigned in the monograph, namely: identity, place, and time. In my investigation, I show how each of the three can be defined, firstly in relation to the other two. For example, the almost uniformly Protestant identity of the Swedes finds its most pronounced expression in the encounter with the Catholic Church’s dominant position in the Italian landscape, which manifests itself not only through churches and other religious buildings but also through the presence of priests and related religious figures. The confessional difference that the Swedish travellers experienced in their encounter with Italy has proven to be a recurring theme in their descriptions, which sometimes took unexpected forms. Nils Bielke’s above-mentioned extensive correspondence from Rome shows conflicting feelings towards both Sweden and the Roman Court, where he would spend thirty years of his life. Bielke’s case evidences the complexity of the Swedes’ contact with the Italian foreign landscape, which requires a re-evaluation of the idea of a stable national identity. Even in his capacity as a traveller, Bielke is problematic as he settled in Rome and became Roman Senator, while he still maintained an outsider’s position. The identity of the travellers could thus be put at stake in the encounter with a culture that was considered to be both foreign and familiar at the same time.
Still, religion is only one of several weighted factors in creating a certain identity, as analysed in my forthcoming book. The ancient heritage of the Italian peninsula is another major one. Specifically, the diversified political map of the Italian peninsula and the sensational archaeological discoveries in Pompeii and Herculaneum, which by the middle of the century attracted the attention of learned Europe, have served as two important frames for illuminating the tension between ancient and modern as experienced by the Swedes in their travels. I discuss the role of antiquity mostly in the second chapter – “Place” – where the issue of the travellers’ expectations and reactions to their empirical exposure to Italy’s ancient remains is of central significance. The travellers’ constant comparison between the classical heritage of the peninsula and its contemporary political division in different states, as well as the precarious position of learning, usually leads to a sense of disappointment. The contemporary Italian landscape rarely lives up to the grandeur of antiquity and it is only in the encounter with the country’s architecture and musical heritage that the Swedish travellers express themselves unreservedly positively.
As the identity of travellers is not, more than to a certain extent, homogeneous, so also travel literature from the Age of Freedom produces a great variety of genres, such as travelogues, diaries, memoirs, letters, and other related formats. In the project, I have, therefore, focused on the various genre characteristics of the Swedes’ writings and, in particular, analysed the rhetorical strategies they employ to describe their encounter with the foreign Italian landscape. This rhetorical analysis has shed light on the recurring patterns of their experiences and perceptions of the Italian states. This investigation has made it possible to answer some of the project’s fundamental questions, namely how the travellers expressed their feelings in the encounter with Italy and what were the purposes behind their values. The term “imaginative topography” coined by literary scholar Chloe Chard – by which she refers to the rhetorical and theoretical strategies that the travellers used to understand and appropriate the foreign – has been influential for the project.
New research questions
Certain new research questions have arisen in the analysis of travel literature from Italy during the Age of Freedom, above all with regard to the relationship between city and country as presented in the travellers’ writings. If cities, and in particular Rome as the main destination of the Swedish Grand Tour, occupy most of the descriptions, the meaning attached to the surrounding landscape and its relationship with the centre of antiquity and Catholicism is a largely unexplored topic. If rural land appears most often as the necessary supplier of raw materials for the city, its role as essential cultural and social foil for the urban is less explored. The traditional view of this relationship presented in the oft-invoked pastoral literature – where the country is considered as a retreat from the city – would benefit from a rigorously expanded scope that considers this relationship also in travel literature.
Research outreach and cooperation
• “Swedish Images of Italy: Travel Literature in the Age of Liberty, 1719-72”, Äldretextseminariet, Stockholms universitet, 2022-03-17 [Digital presentation on zoom].
• “Swedish Images of Italy: Travel Literature in the Age of Liberty, 1719-72”, Research seminar, Svenska institutet i Rom, 2022-03-03.
• “Ledsagare i den eviga staden: Reseskildringar av Rom under 16- och 1700-talen”, RELS (Reselitteraturseminariet) and Higher seminar Department of Literature, Uppsala university, 2021-12-02.
• “Sevärdheter i Rom. Guideböckernas betydelse för nordiska resenärer under 1600- och 1700-talen”, Senioruniversitets seminarieserie Ut i vida världen – svenska författare och resenärer från Linné till Martinson, 2021-10-08.
• “Carl Tersmedens italienska resa våren 1736”, Riddarhuset, Stockholm, 2021-02-16
The presentation is available here: www.riddarhuset.se/blog/2020/08/31/carltersmeden/?tag=historia
The purpose of this project has been to shed light on the representation of the foreign in the writings of Swedish travellers to the Italian peninsula in the first half of the eighteenth century. In my examination of travel literature from the Age of Freedom (Frihetstiden, 1719-1772), I have focused on how the travellers express in their writings their appropriation of or dissociation from Italian culture and society. The project, which will result in a monograph, thus contributes to an enriched understanding of the cultural relations between Sweden and the Italian states during the Age of Freedom.
During my six-month stay at the Swedish Institute in Rome (January to June 2022), I both completed my collection of sources and progressed considerably in the writing of the monograph. Approximately two-thirds of the book have been written, with an anticipated completion of the full manuscript in 2023. In the beginning of 2024, I will be able to submit the typescript for consideration and contracting to a leading international publisher. Additionally, during my research period in Rome, I presented my results in various academic environments both in Italy and in Sweden (please see the list of lectures below). Through the diverse contexts in which the work was presented, I have thus actively contributed to the dissemination of the project’s results both within and outside academia.
The collection of sources and writing of the monograph is a direct continuation of my previous research on early modern travel literature on which I have already published extensively (see the list of publications), without, however, any overlap with prior research projects.
Project execution
In the spring I had the opportunity to carry out and finalize extensive archival research which I initially began some years ago. The project largely consists of primary research based on hitherto unstudied and mainly unpublished archive and library sources. I had previously focused my work on Swedish archives and libraries – such as Uppsala University Library’s collection of travel writings as well as private archives preserved at the National Archives (among others the Bergshamra and Tessinska collection) and the archives of the Royal Academy of Arts. Therefore, during my stay in Italy, I was able to compare and contextualize these sources with those available in Italian collections and archival holdings regarding Swedish travellers in the first half of the eighteenth century.
In particular, the writings of three Swedish travellers have been closely examined alongside the extant information in Italian archives and libraries. These are: Georg Fröman’s (d. 1767) “Anteckningar av onämnd från en resa 1755-56 till Italien” (Uppsala University Library, X 290 ba:2); Carl Tersmeden’s (1715-1797) extensive memoirs (fourteen volumes held in private estate records); and the Roman senator Nils Bielke’s (1706-1765) correspondence with his wife Hedvig Elisabeth Sack and his brother-in-law Carl Gustav Tessin (1695-1770), to be found in the National Archives in Stockholm. I have compared and contrasted the accounts of the Italian states provided in these three authors’ travelogues with information in, indicatively, Archivio di Stato di Genova, Archivio di Stato and Archivio Storico Municipale (Naples), Biblioteca Apostolica and Archivio Segreto (Vatican State), Archivio di Stato and Biblioteca Hertziana (Rome), and Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Venice). The investigation of the traces left by the Swedish travellers in Italian archives and libraries constitutes an essential mapping of their presence in the country, as well as a requisite complementation of their responses to the cultural, political, religious and social development of the Italian peninsula.
While completing the collection of sources, I have also continued to write the monograph. This focuses primarily on three Italian states in the early eighteenth century: a republic, Genoa (Repubblica di Genova); a monarchy, Naples (Regno delle due Sicilie); and a theocracy, the Papal States. The book develops an analysis of these pre-modern Italian states in three dedicated chapters entitled “Identity”, “Place” and “Time” respectively. An introductory and a concluding chapter complete the monograph. The first two chapters were written during the spring of 2022; in the autumn I have continued with the preparation of the third chapter.
The three most important results of the project
The most important results from the investigation I carried out in the spring of 2022 at the Swedish Institute in Rome can be summarized thus:
1. The collection, completion and contextualization of archive and library sources regarding Swedish travels to Italy in the Age of Freedom;
2. The writing of approximately two-thirds of the monograph on the subject;
3. The continuous presentation of my research results both within and outside of academia in a series of invited talks.
Conclusions of the project
Several of the project’s emerging insights regarding Swedish travels to Italy during the Age of Freedom have been achieved through the cross-fertilization of the three main categories to which a chapter is respectively assigned in the monograph, namely: identity, place, and time. In my investigation, I show how each of the three can be defined, firstly in relation to the other two. For example, the almost uniformly Protestant identity of the Swedes finds its most pronounced expression in the encounter with the Catholic Church’s dominant position in the Italian landscape, which manifests itself not only through churches and other religious buildings but also through the presence of priests and related religious figures. The confessional difference that the Swedish travellers experienced in their encounter with Italy has proven to be a recurring theme in their descriptions, which sometimes took unexpected forms. Nils Bielke’s above-mentioned extensive correspondence from Rome shows conflicting feelings towards both Sweden and the Roman Court, where he would spend thirty years of his life. Bielke’s case evidences the complexity of the Swedes’ contact with the Italian foreign landscape, which requires a re-evaluation of the idea of a stable national identity. Even in his capacity as a traveller, Bielke is problematic as he settled in Rome and became Roman Senator, while he still maintained an outsider’s position. The identity of the travellers could thus be put at stake in the encounter with a culture that was considered to be both foreign and familiar at the same time.
Still, religion is only one of several weighted factors in creating a certain identity, as analysed in my forthcoming book. The ancient heritage of the Italian peninsula is another major one. Specifically, the diversified political map of the Italian peninsula and the sensational archaeological discoveries in Pompeii and Herculaneum, which by the middle of the century attracted the attention of learned Europe, have served as two important frames for illuminating the tension between ancient and modern as experienced by the Swedes in their travels. I discuss the role of antiquity mostly in the second chapter – “Place” – where the issue of the travellers’ expectations and reactions to their empirical exposure to Italy’s ancient remains is of central significance. The travellers’ constant comparison between the classical heritage of the peninsula and its contemporary political division in different states, as well as the precarious position of learning, usually leads to a sense of disappointment. The contemporary Italian landscape rarely lives up to the grandeur of antiquity and it is only in the encounter with the country’s architecture and musical heritage that the Swedish travellers express themselves unreservedly positively.
As the identity of travellers is not, more than to a certain extent, homogeneous, so also travel literature from the Age of Freedom produces a great variety of genres, such as travelogues, diaries, memoirs, letters, and other related formats. In the project, I have, therefore, focused on the various genre characteristics of the Swedes’ writings and, in particular, analysed the rhetorical strategies they employ to describe their encounter with the foreign Italian landscape. This rhetorical analysis has shed light on the recurring patterns of their experiences and perceptions of the Italian states. This investigation has made it possible to answer some of the project’s fundamental questions, namely how the travellers expressed their feelings in the encounter with Italy and what were the purposes behind their values. The term “imaginative topography” coined by literary scholar Chloe Chard – by which she refers to the rhetorical and theoretical strategies that the travellers used to understand and appropriate the foreign – has been influential for the project.
New research questions
Certain new research questions have arisen in the analysis of travel literature from Italy during the Age of Freedom, above all with regard to the relationship between city and country as presented in the travellers’ writings. If cities, and in particular Rome as the main destination of the Swedish Grand Tour, occupy most of the descriptions, the meaning attached to the surrounding landscape and its relationship with the centre of antiquity and Catholicism is a largely unexplored topic. If rural land appears most often as the necessary supplier of raw materials for the city, its role as essential cultural and social foil for the urban is less explored. The traditional view of this relationship presented in the oft-invoked pastoral literature – where the country is considered as a retreat from the city – would benefit from a rigorously expanded scope that considers this relationship also in travel literature.
Research outreach and cooperation
• “Swedish Images of Italy: Travel Literature in the Age of Liberty, 1719-72”, Äldretextseminariet, Stockholms universitet, 2022-03-17 [Digital presentation on zoom].
• “Swedish Images of Italy: Travel Literature in the Age of Liberty, 1719-72”, Research seminar, Svenska institutet i Rom, 2022-03-03.
• “Ledsagare i den eviga staden: Reseskildringar av Rom under 16- och 1700-talen”, RELS (Reselitteraturseminariet) and Higher seminar Department of Literature, Uppsala university, 2021-12-02.
• “Sevärdheter i Rom. Guideböckernas betydelse för nordiska resenärer under 1600- och 1700-talen”, Senioruniversitets seminarieserie Ut i vida världen – svenska författare och resenärer från Linné till Martinson, 2021-10-08.
• “Carl Tersmedens italienska resa våren 1736”, Riddarhuset, Stockholm, 2021-02-16
The presentation is available here: www.riddarhuset.se/blog/2020/08/31/carltersmeden/?tag=historia