Literary Parks

From the book to the territory in which it was born and developed, from the page to the places that inspired it: this could be the concise formula to define one of the essential concepts of the patrimonialisation of literature. Within this concept, the Italian Literary Parks system groups collective cultural initiatives aimed at promoting the works and the authors of literature for a public of visitors invited to discover a territory. The Literary Parks are different from both natural parks, created for the protection and enhancement of the natural environment, and literary theme parks (Phillips, 1999), dedicated to a national historical figure or an imaginary character, often with a playful function of narrativising the space, such as the Pinocchio Collodi Polycentric Park in Tuscany, The World of Beatrix Potter in the Lake District, or the Europa Park dedicated to the Brothers Grimm in Germany. Literary Parks, on the other hand, are not limited to a precise perimeter, but they extend over a broad geographical and cultural area that corresponds to the biographical, physical, mental and spiritual space and the places of a writer and/or his or her literary work: author’s houses, paths, city centres, roads, historic buildings, landscapes of various kinds, objects, as well as traditions, crafts, food and wine, museums, even the sensations linked to literary memory (smells, tastes, light, sounds, colours). The creation of a Literary Park is based on the contributions offered by a writer’s biography, the reading and study of his or her texts (which, in this case, can become actual topographical guides) and the resources offered by the territory and its inhabitants. In fact, Italian Parks function by means of an interaction between representatives of the socio-economic sectors, literature scholars, those involved in the management and promotion of the territory and the involvement of the local population, including entrepreneurs, thanks, for example, to the cooking, the theatrical performances, the festivals, the book publishing, the travel on tourist trains or other types of events.

In addition to the cultural initiatives linked to the preservation and conservation of literature, the Literary Parks also intend to participate in the management of the territory through the promotion of a writer and his “world”, so their boundaries may partially coincide with those of an existing natural park (this is a case of co-location): for example, the Literary Parks dedicated to Dante Alighieri (Le Terre di Dante) and to Emma Perodi partly extend into the National Park of the Casentinesi Forests, in the province of Arezzo (Tuscany); the Attilio, Bernardo and Giuseppe Bertolucci Literary Park extends into the Parchi del Ducato, in the province of Parma (Emilia). An emblematic and historical example of the co-location of literary tourism and preserved natural environment is the Poets’ circuit in the Lake District, Northern England, which does not form a literary park as it is understood in Italy: it includes Wordsworth’s house and cottage, Rydal Mount and Dora’s Field. While the Literary Park system in Italy establishes a close link between the writer’s places, nature and the territory, in France, on the other hand, another model of preservation and conservation of literary places prevails through the Fédération Nationale des Maisons d’Écrivains et des Patrimoines Littéraires network, which proposes circuits around writers’ homes and/or museums (literary trips, outings, walks). While in Spain, the Rutas cientifícas, artísticas y literarias have been proposing cultural itineraries with a strong educational dimension since 2014.

The purpose of Italian Literary Parks is to protect, enhance and reconstitute, in an authentic context for the visitor and with the active participation of the local population, the visual and emotional environment, i.e. the physical and sensory atmosphere of a literary experience, either already taken place (if the visitor knows the author and his books and finds the atmosphere) or to be discovered (in this case, the emotional experience of the Literary Park aims to arouse curiosity for the writer and his books). Visiting a Literary Park thus implies moving from an indeterminate space to places that are well-defined and characterised by means of a «topographical eye» (Dossena, 2003: 8) that follows a literary geography in which a contextualised biographical and textual memory is placed. Literary history is experienced in the open air, while cultural and heritage management is spatialised through new forms of responsible and sustainable territory promotion.

The idea of creating literary parks originated in Italy at the end of the 20th century (1992), through the initiatives of Stanislao Nievo (1928-2006) – great-grandson of the 19th century writer Ippolito Nievo – and his Foundation. Nievo wanted to safeguard the heritage of his illustrious ancestor, which had been partially damaged after an earthquake in Friuli. Thus the Ippolito Nievo Park was born around the castle of Collaredo di Montalbano, followed by other parks dedicated to Eugenio Montale (in Liguria), Giosuè Carducci (in Tuscany), Dante Alighieri (between Tuscany and Romagna), etc.

The collaboration between the Ippolito Nievo Foundation, the Italian Touring Club, the Society for Youth Entrepreneurship and funding from the European Commission – under the patronage of Unesco – enabled the creation of many parks in Italy in the 1990s and 2000s: there were 38 parks on the threshold of 2000, from Piedmont to Sicily. That period was defined as a ‘Parks boom’, with more than 300,000 visitors in 2000-2001 (Capecchi, 2021: 167-168), coinciding with the interest of researchers who published articles and essays on the subject. The explosion was unfortunately followed by a more difficult period with the closure of some parks after 2006. Today, fewer parks are characterised by coherence between economic, cultural and environmental objectives. Most of the current 32 parks belonging to the Literary Parks network are located in the central-southern and insular part of Italy: 4 in Abruzzo, 6 in Basilicata, 1 in Calabria, 1 in Campania, 1 in Emilia Romagna, 3 in Lazio, 1 in Liguria, 3 in Lombardy, 1 in Marche, 1 in Molise, 1 in Piedmont, 1 in Apulia, 2 in Sardinia, 3 in Sicily, 2 in Tuscany and 1 in Veneto.

Since 2009, it is the Paesaggio Culturale Italiano Ltd – a name that evokes the tradition of the Grand Tour and combines the two notions of natural beauty and cultural heritage – that manages the Literary Parks, which form a national and international network in Italy and Norway. In this Scandinavian country, there are Parks dedicated to Johan Peter Falkberget (Røros), Pietro Querini (Røst) and Sigrid Unset (Lillehammer) respectively. A park project is emerging in France, dedicated to writers (from Petrarch to Pagnol) who visited and evoked, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, the area of the monumental ancient Roman aqueduct of Pont du Gard, between Provence and Languedoc. The current president of the network is Stanislao de Marsanich, whose aim is to safeguard places through literature. Each park is situated in a place connected to a writer. The Literary Parks network publishes the ParkTime Magazine online.

Research in the field of studies of literary sources as the basis for the creation of a place of memory, the design of the project in agreement with the various partners, and the implementation of the project involving both the cultural and tourism fields (i.e., the integration of facilities to welcome visitors, such as accommodation and restaurants) constitute three complementary and indispensable poles to start the creation of a new park.

The Parks, organised around the biography of a writer and the places of his or her texts (including those written during the exile, citing the example of the Carlo Levi Park, set in places of political confinement in Basilicata), propose literary itineraries in a plural ecosystem that varies according to the specific identity of each territory linked to a given figure. Most of the time, these include domestic and personal places (such as the houses where writers lived and worked, even the site of a tragic death, e.g., the Pier Paolo Pasolini Park in Ostia), museum and heritage structures, nature trails, exhibitions, cultural events and various visitor facilities.

In Italy, Parks are distributed in areas linked to a strong literary memory and where there is a desire to enhance an area, which is why they are often created off the major mass tourism circuits (with a few exceptions, e.g. the Eugenio Montale Park in the Cinque Terre, in Liguria), with the idea of developing cultural tourism in places that have hitherto been little visited or isolated (Nievo, 1998: 14). The most emblematic recent example could be the Policarpo Petrocchi Park in Tuscany, in the province of Pistoia, created in 2021 (Capecchi, 2023). Another objective of the Italian parks is to consider literature as a lever to trigger local initiatives aimed at safeguarding of an intangible heritage: for example, the Park dedicated to the poet Albino Pierro, in Basilicata, has allowed to preserve the use of a local dialect; the Emma Perodi Park, in Tuscany, author of fairy tales and novels for children, gives importance to the transmission of oral tales reinterpreted by the new generations.

Whether it is an original key to bring literature to life with a wide audience, or an instrument for interpreting a territory according to coordinates that are both cultural and geographical, or an agent for promotion – even the development and redevelopment of an area (Barilaro, 2004) –, the Literary Park proposes a multiple cultural product with a transtouristic or post-touristic vocation (Bourdeau, 2018), based on the dual emotional and intellectual experience of the visitor who does not merely see the literary places but participates in an operation of cultural mediation and recognition of writers (De Gregorio, 2021).

How to cite this dictionary entry: Gouchan, Y.  (2023). Literary Parks. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.). E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia.