Literary Tourism

We speak of literary tourism as any journey undertaken to visit a place related to a writer, work or literary event. The travel (tour, hence tourist/tourism) can have a long or short temporal duration and spatial dimension: however, it must be induced by the desire to travel to where a writer lived or to the places, real or imaginary, featured in their work (Croy, 2012). By extension, it is also possible to speak of literary tourism for trips made not so much to retrace the footsteps of an author or to immerse oneself in the landscape that inspired his or her texts, but to visit towns that have taken on the identity of book cities or centers that host literary festivals: the small Scottish village of Hey-on-Wye, for example, has become internationally the place for books since Richard Booth opened the first secondhand book store in 1961, is now home to numerous bookstores, annually promotes a festival that has served as a model for many other similar events scattered around the world (e.g., the FestivaLetteratura in Mantua, Italy), and attracts international literary tourism (Lemmi & Siena, 2010); Edinburgh has established itself in the world as a UNESCO “literature” city par excellence, has a tourism that is linked to this identity, while also being the city of Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Burns, to whom a notable Writers Museum is dedicated (Arcos-Pumarola, 2019).

Forms of literary tourism have existed even in ancient times. There is no shortage of those who trace this form of travel back to the 1300s, when the first pilgrimages were made to the places associated with the memory of Francesco Petrarca and Laura (the woman loved and sung about in Rerum vulgarium fragmenta) in Provence, southern France (Hendrix, 2008). The first reflections on the “attractive” force exerted by Dante Alighieri’s tomb in Ravenna also date back to the same century. Giovanni Boccaccio, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante (whose first draft dates back to the years 1350-1355), did not hesitate to point out how Florence, the city in which the author of the Divine Comedy was born and from which he had been exiled for political reasons, had lost to the benefit of Ravenna, then and in the centuries to come, an extraordinary chance to make himself known in the world.

An important chapter of literary tourism, however, concerns mainly the period between the late 1700s and the first half of the 1800s. In Romanticism, as admiration for the subjectivity of the creative poet became established, trips made to the places of writers and their books intensified. Grand Tour travellers and intellectuals moving through that historical and cultural period wished to visit sites associated with poetry and writing: Lord Byron, for example, during his stays in Italy went to Arquà (where Petrarca spent the last years of his life), to Ravenna (linked to the memory of Dante) and to Ferrara, the city of Ludovico Ariosto (author of Orlando furioso) but, above all, of Torquato Tasso, the poet who, in the second half of the 1500s, had written Gerusalemme liberata and had been imprisoned in the asylum of Sant’Anna for his character excesses as a “mad” poet. The cell in which Tasso had been confined was visited, in addition to Byron, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Rogers and Stendhal, who also went to Florence to see for himself the church of Santa Croce, to which Ugo Foscolo had dedicated unforgettable verses in Sepolcri. Four decades later, in 1847, Gustave Flaubert, together with his friend Maxime Du Camp, went to St. Malo to pay homage to the sepulchre that Chateaubriand (also among the visitors to Torquato Tasso’s prison in Ferrara) had built for himself on a small island in front of the Normandy town (Capecchi, 2021-2022).

Literary tourism, however, long remained tied to the experience of individual men of culture: group trips to visit the houses where writers had lived or their graves are exceptions, although there is no shortage of such examples in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Capecchi & Mosena, 2023). For a more contemporary dimension of literary tourism, however, it is necessary to go through the second half of the 1900s and, most importantly, the beginning of the 21st century. The second half of the 20th century witnessed the birth of renewed reflection on the subject and the creation of new tools that could stimulate travel to the places of writers and writing: the publication, in 1964, of the Guide littéraire de la France represents, from this point of view, an exemplary case, in many respects pioneering, both for the reflections made in the introduction (which underline the growing space that, in the sphere of cultural tourism, literary tourism is assuming) as well as for the monumentality of the undertaking (the Guide has a degree of thoroughness and detail that is difficult to replicate), and for the identification of a tool – the literary Guide, precisely – capable of meeting the literary tourists’ information needs and, at the same time, able to motivate this kind of travel (Macleod, 2021). Guidebooks, which had been the exception (among them Homes and Hunts of the most eminent British poets, published in 1847), began to be written and published in several European countries. Their number increased significantly from 2006-2008, in a renewed momentum of literary tourism, which in Italy is also linked, for example, to the birth and rebirth of Literary Parks (Persi & Dai Pra’, 2002; Marengo, 2022). They were created in 1992 and began a new season in 2009, with the creation of Paesaggio Culturale Italiano, the company that manages its branding and establishment. The post-Covid years, finally, signal a further development and increase in literary tourism, associated with the growing need for travelling with cultural motivations and to discover places less travelled by mass tourists. Tourists look for itineraries that favour slowness and sustainability. This recent and ongoing phase is also matched by the intensification of studies and research on the subject (Baleiro et al., 2022) and the growing attention of the tourism industry to this expanding tourism niche.

The link between study and research on the one hand and economics on the other is one of the fundamental elements of literary tourism. If writers can create tourist places (Pocock, 1981), it is necessary to study the link between an author and a place and to select the passages of their work that tell the story of that particular site. In this sense, research concerning literary travellers offers the preliminary information for building, around the “literariness” of a place, adequate tools (such as literary guides, either printed or in Apps, but also more concise publications, such as leaflets and brochures) and literary tourist products and experiences that tourism operators will be able to manage. For literary tourism products to emerge, literature must meet economics, and scientific and academic research must provide the basis for better defining literary products’ content and promotional and communication strategies. Some fundamental reflections are connected to this development, and consequences must be considered when determining literary tourism. We limit ourselves to highlighting some of them. Scientific research without practical application does not generate literary tourism products, but tourism products unsupported by scientific research and theoretical reflection have, in general, fragile foundations and are inadequate from a cultural point of view. Hence the necessary link between the field of research and tourism professionals. Literary tourism needs to be approached, at the same time, from several points of view and with distinct skills, as its very nature is transdisciplinary: literary, geographic, museographic, economic, and marketing knowledge are needed to define it and to stimulate it. Literary tourism does not address only the (admittedly small) audience of literary experts. However, it aims to involve those who are more generically attracted to cultural travel, have an interest in reading, and are sensitive to the interweaving of knowledge, experience and emotions.

Without the possibility of tracing, in this dictionary entry, a complete panorama of the present, we can briefly conclude that today literary tourism is becoming the focus of systematic study and research activities (the Center for Literary Tourism TULE, promoter of this online Dictionary, is a testimony to this). In Europe and beyond European borders, there is a flourishing number of publishing initiatives about this tourism niche, which is progressively more present in the proposals of tour operators. Expressions such as “literary journey”, “literary itinerary”, and “literary walk” are now used with increasing frequency on tourist webpages, while literary heritage is increasingly valued as a promoter of a territory and a propeller of visits. However, “more and more” does not mean “always”: as such, there is, in the field of literary tourism, ample room for work to make sure that the added value that literature can guarantee to a place is discovered, studied and communicated, to motivate travel and thus, with the consequent positive economic effects, literary tourism.

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