Maria Flavia Maiorano

The research project focuses on odeporic texts written between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century by Italian salonnières and Arcadian poetesses. The selected corpus includes writings—some of them unpublished—that are quite varied in genre: diaries, illustrated volumes, poetic compositions. The journeys recounted in these texts serve an educational function similar to that fulfilled by the Grand Tour for foreigners, representing the culmination of the educational path that the authors undertake in their respective salons and in the Arcadia Academy. In light of such testimonies, the salon and Arcadian environments emerge not only as places of cultural formation, but also as privileged centers for the spread of female mobility. The aim is to recover and analyze—using research methods ranging from historical-philological approaches to comparative, cultural, and women's studies—travel writings that have long been neglected by critics. In doing so, the ambition is to restore a missing link that allows the connection of Italian female odeporic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the much better-known accounts of foreign travelers of the Grand Tour.