Literary Places

A place is defined as "literary" when it relates to a writer's life (or specific moments of his life) and/or his work. Literary places, par excellence, are the house where the writer was born, lived and died: buildings that sometimes do not retain signs that recall their presence but are often marked with plaques and inscriptions displayed outside or that have become museums. But a literary place is also the café frequented by the writer, the hotel where they stayed assiduously, the cemetery where their tombs are, and any environment (public or private building, indoor or outdoor space) that their presence has traversed. Finally, literary places are those related to the writer's work: the landscape they observed and that the writers represent – in various levels of realism – in the written page, or the place in which the characters move, that serves as the background to the narrative or to which the verses refer (Baxter, 2019; Capecchi, 2021-2022).

The two primary elements that determine the literaryness of a place (the presence of an author and the connection to the work) can contribute to varying degrees to this determination. Some places are literary because they are linked above all to the biography of an author: Alessandro Manzoni's house, for example, which has become a museum, is a landmark on the literary map of Milan, as the author of The Betrothed (a novel written in the ground-floor study of that house) does not portray it in its pages. On the other hand, a place may become literary mainly because it is depicted in the author's work. This second category also includes the places linked to the plot created by the writer's imagination: one such example is Sherlock Holmes's house, at 221/B Baker Street in London (although the house when Conan Doyle wrote the novel did not even have that number). Another example is Dorothy's house in Liberal (Kansas), where the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz 'lived' (Timoty & Boyd, 2007). In short, either biography or the work unite and intertwine in creating a literary space.

Literary places are geographically determined. Their concreteness represents a fundamental element they derive with significant consequences. Starting with the attention geographers have devoted to literature and its relationship with geography and literary tourism (Bagnoli, 2022). Hence, the importance of cartographies and literary maps in literary touring: the map of a State or Region indicating the places where authors have lived or set their works, but also the maps (e.g., of a city) highlighting the points of interest for those who wish to make a journey in the footsteps of a poet. Identifying precise places guides the reading of texts by those concerned with literary sites. Indeed, the reader must open his “topographical eye” (Dossena, 1972) and pay attention to all passages referring to a place. Without this geographical determinacy, literary tourism could not exist, as it requires the identification of a specific site that can be reached and visited.

Literary places are not determined once and for all, which is why literary geography is enriched over time. Every literary site has become such at a particular time. For example, the Luzzatti neighbourhood in Naples is currently visited by readers from all over the world because the story of Elena Ferrante's international best-seller tetralogy (which opened with L'amica geniale) is set there. However, before publishing the four novels between 2011 and 2014, that place did not exist as a destination for literary tourists. And the fact that the Neapolitan suburbian neighbourhood, around which tour operators and tourist guides have sprung up, does not, in itself, have any relevant elements from a historical-architectural point of view powerfully underlines the power that the literary page can have in creating the evocative image of a place, which readers wish to visit and get to know. This attraction results in a two-way exchange between real space and text, which is "created" and influenced by the written page. The Khan el-Khalili neighbourhood and El Fishawy Café in Cairo have taken on literary significance after Nagib Mahfuz, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, lived there and narrated them, while Munro's Bookstore in Victoria, Canada, has become a literary place capable of attracting international visitors since Alice Munro, who founded it and ran it for several years with her husband, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Once it has become literary, a place no longer loses this characteristic: its "literariness" may be forgotten or overlooked, but it represents an acquired and non-erasable fact.

Literature can make a place take on a relevance that it would not otherwise have and create a tourist place (Pocock, 1981). A place, the moment it becomes literary, has an added value that can be studied appropriately and communicated but can also be overlooked and forgotten. The presence of an author changes the relevance of a place: the town of Alcalá de Hernanes, in Spain, would not welcome so many visitors if it were not the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of one of the books that belongs to universal literature (i.e., Don Quixote); in Italy, the town of Recanati, in the Marche, owes its fame to Giacomo Leopardi, the poet who was born and lived there (in a palace that is now a famous museum) and who dedicated to his village important texts collected in the Canti (1831). There are cities that, for those who love culture, have taken on a robust literary identity because of their connection with their authors, e.g., Buenos Aires and Jorge Luis Borges, Dublin and James Joyce, Prague and Franz Kafka, Lisbon and Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Tabucchi, this last reference may be more significant for Italian readers (Traficante, 2019).

Literary places have generated and continue to foster literary tourism, as they are the guidelines that organise a literary tour. Historically, other writers have visited literary sites and sometimes left evidence of their visits. The literariness of a place, thus, is intensified, and a stratification of physical presences and annotations about that particular site is generated. Ravenna, for example, became the city associated with Dante after the author of Divina Commedia spent the last years of his life there as an exile and, more importantly, after he died and was buried there. Over the centuries, his tomb has been visited by many travellers and, among them, by numerous poets and writers who, by staying in Ravenna and recounting the city, have reinforced the place's literary value. In front of La Spezia, in the internationally known landscape of the Cinque Terre, the Gulf of the Poets became a literary place following the shipwreck of Percy B. Shelley in 1822. Because his presence and end wrapped the Gulf in a poetic and mythical halo, many writers and poets (including Virginia Woolf) decided to visit and stay there.

The identification and study of the space where it is possible to identify literary markers lie at the heart of literary tourism (Baleiro & Pereira, 2022). Knowing that an author has passed through a given place, selecting the documents (including iconographic ones) that bear witness to it, and analysing the written work to infer sentences and pages that tell the story of the place represents the first and necessary moment to make sure that a literary place is described and promoted. Literariness does not constitute a visible and tangible element: it belongs to a place's intangible heritage or vertical value. For this value to be visible, it must be studied, known and made known (Gouchan et al., 2023). The attractiveness of a literary place is undoubtedly linked to the notoriety of the writer: the better known an author is, the stronger their ability to make the literary place become a tourist attraction. However, this process also associates with the capacity for communication and promotion, which becomes essential, especially when one wants to make people visit a place that is distant from the usual routes.

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