Course Description
This course is about the long history of outsiders traveling to Italy and the texts they wrote in which they remembered, described, and refashioned their experiences. Students will learn about the history of travel to Italy, the changing nature of the travelers, their means of travel, their motivations, and the genre of travel writing itself. We will read a few medieval accounts, but most of the people we will study traveled and wrote in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. We will encounter medieval pilgrims, eighteenth-century aristocrats, nineteenth-century women, and twentieth-century Easy Jet travelers, as well as unwilling and accidental travelers–– enslaved people, soldiers, and refugees. Students will use these accounts alongside the scholarship on travel and memory to reflect on their travels here and fashion their memories and accounts of travel. A number of our classes will involve outside-the-classroom activities.

Learning Outcomes
1. By the end of this course, students will understand that the experience and memory of travel and the ways it is written about are historically constructed.
2. They will understand that the kinds of people who traveled to Italy, the Italy they encountered, and the kinds of texts written about travel changed dramatically over time; and they will be able to historicize their own time in Italy.
3. They will be able to prepare and deliver effective oral presentations and communicate their ideas effectively.
4. Hone skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking.
5. They will gain experience working on group projects.
6. This class also holds that writing is thinking. Because of this, students will keep a public-facing Field Notes Journal. They will write multiple entries each week, recording the insights gained from assigned readings and discussions and reflecting on how other earlier travelers and their accounts are shaping their own experiences and memories of travel to Italy.

Teaching and Evaluation Methods
The class is discussion-based, so a commitment to careful reading and engaged participation is required. Students are also responsible for creating six short group presentations in which they teach other class members about a secondary source assigned to their group. Finally, the main written component of this class is a Field Notes Journal, in which students document, through specific assignments and reflections, reactions to what we are reading and learning in class and their own experiences as a traveler to Italy.

All readings and reading notes must be completed before class. All Field Note assignments, like the readings, are due at the beginning of each class.

Reading, intellectually engaged class participation, and doing your share to create group presentations are required. Participation in class co-curricular activities is required as well.

Assessment is weighted as follows
20% Attendance, reading notes, and engaged, informed, and active class participation.
20% Participation in the creation of six short group presentations.
60% A Field Notes Journal, written over the course of the semester. The professor will checks Field Note Journals at the beginning of every class. At least 60 pages of text, reading notes, lists, and illustrations by the end of the semester.

 

Course Schedule

 

Topic One: Getting Oriented
Class 1:
An explanation of the class, its readings, and assignments. We will talk about class presentations, discussions, and, most important of all, the class Field Notes Journal. We will also make plans for our next class.

 

Topic Two: The Speed and Scale of Travel
Class 2:
Reading to be completed before class:
John Urry, “The Social Organization of Travel,” in idem, Consuming Places (London, 1995), 142–5.

The Speed and Scale of Travel pdf: includes selections from the following:
Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri (1498).

Frontispiece Coryat’s Crudities: Hastily Gobbled Up in Five Moneth’s Travels (1611) Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, “September 11,” Italian Journey (1786).
Henry Coxe, A Picture of Italy (1815).

Nathaniel Parker Willis, Pencillings by the Way: Written During Some Years of Residence and Travel in Europe (1835).

John Murray, Murray’s Hand-Book Central Italy & Rome (London, 1842).

D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)
Mary Taylor Simeti, On Peresephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal (1986).

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 1: due at the beginning of class (based on today’s assigned readings). 1) Take notes in your Field Notes Journal on the readings due for today’s class. 2) Then create a list (also in your journal) of difficulties that the modes of transportation in operation across time presented to travelers to Italy. 3) Write a parallel list detailing the opportunities and experiences that arose from these difficulties. 4) Finally, write a paragraph or two reflecting on how your own experiences of travel to Italy, although more convenient, may be missing some of the opportunities earlier modes of travel could bring about.

Class discussion:
We will discuss today’s readings with the help of your first Field Notes entry. We will also share our first Field Notes entries and work as a group to make them as interesting, effective, and evocative as possible.

Class 3:
Reading to be completed before class:
The class will be divided into three groups, and each group will be assigned a different reading. Your group (with a PowerPoint, if you would like) will teach other members of the class what you learned from your reading in a 10-minute presentation. Your presentation should concentrate on how visitors to Italy impact the places to which they travel. After the presentations, we will have a class discussion on the points raised in the presentations and the lessons learned. You will have the first half hour of class on the day of your presentation to go over the final details.

Group One: Lodging
Rosa Salzberg, “Mobility, Cohabitation, and Cultural Exchange in the Lodging Houses of Early Modern Venice,” Urban History, 46:3 (2019), 398–418.

ASC Addresses the Housing Crisis in Venice - The Borgen Project

Group Two: Overtourism
Dario Bertocchi and Francesco Visentin, “‘The Overwhelmed City:’ Physical and Social Over-Capacities of Global Tourism in Venice,” Sustainability, 11 (2019), 1–16.

Barbara Staniscia, “Tourism and Sustainability in the Historic City of Rome: Challenge or Threat?,” in Valerie Higgins and Diane Douglas, eds., Communities and Cultural Heritage: Global Issues, Local Values (New York, 2021), 146–56.

Group Three: Mass Transportation
Stephanie Malia Hom, “Masses in Transit: The New Economy of Tourism in the Twentieth Century,” in idem, The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, 2015), 127–51.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 2: Take notes on the reading assigned to your group. Then, list the most important takeaways from this reading that you think your group should explore in its presentation. Use these notes when you meet as a group to put together your ten-minute class presentation.

Group Presentations made in class:
A half an hour for group work.
Groups give their presentations, followed by a general discussion.

Class 4: Out-of-the-classroom activity no. 1:

Readings to be completed before this activity:
Sharon Ouditt and Lordeana Polezzai, “Introduction: Italy as Place and Space,” Studies in Travel Writing, 16:2 (2012), 97–105.

Filippo de Vivo, “Walking in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Mobilizing the Early Modern City, I Tattti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 19:1 (2016), 115–41, read only 115–18, 125–41.

Writing to be completed before this out-of-the-classroom class:
Field Notes Entry 3: due before you embark on our first out-of-the-classroom activity (and based on today’s assigned readings). Take notes in your journal on the readings due for today’s class. These notes will prepare you for our discussion next week.

Instead of meeting in our classroom out-of-the-classroom activity:
Instead of meeting in our classroom, do the following. [You can go alone, with classmates, with friends, or with me and my partner, who will also do this activity with or without you, but would love your company.] Find, explore, learn about, and take selfies in a minimum of three of the following places, either in front of or inside the following buildings/neighborhoods:
● The Ghetto
● Fondaco dei Turchi
● Riva degli Schiavoni
● Fondaco dei Tedeschi
● Scuola dei Greci
● Sante Croce degli Armeni
● Scuola di Santa Maria degli Albanesi
These Venetian sites witness the lives of what, in the sixteenth century, city officials considered members of foreign communities, some of which persisted in Venice for centuries.

Writing to be completed before our next class:
Based on this activity, write the following two Field Notes entires. We will discuss them at the beginning of class no. 5.

Field Notes Entry 4: Create a list of sites you visited in the order you visited them, and provide a map of your itinerary. Include a sentence or two about the community each site witnesses and the date that the community arrived. Feel free to work with other members of the class and share background information. Then write an informal piece detailing in words and pictures your search for
Renaissance-period “visitors” to Italy, how the memory of their presence is inscribed in the urban landscape, and what these places say about the transitory nature or permanence of foreigners in Italy. Leave a blank page after this Field Notes entry.

Field Notes Entry 5: First, reflect on how the experience of walking in twenty-first-century Venice contrasts with the experience of walking in Venice during the period of the Renaissance. Then reflect on your own experience of walking in Venice as an outsider and contrast it to the sensations of walking at home. Both reflections should be informed by your reading of di Vivo’s “Walking in Sixteenth-Century Venice.”

 

Topic Three: Evolving Motivations and Practices of Travel
Class 5:
Reading to be completed before class:
Each group will be assigned a different reading. Your group will write a 10-minute presentation (with a PowerPoint, if you would like), which you will use to teach other members of the class what you learned from your reading. After the presentations, we will have a class discussion on the points raised in the presentations and the lessons we can take away from them. You will have the first half an hour of class to go over the final details.

Group One:
María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui, “Educating the Travelers: The Tutors,” in Mariá Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui and Scott Wilcox, eds., The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmoreland: An Episode of the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2012), 88–97.

Group Two:
Jeremy Black, “The Debate Over the Grand Tour: Conclusions,” in idem, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1997), 287–305.

Group Three:
James Buzard, “By the Book,” in idem, The Beaten Track: Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture,” 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1993), 65–79.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 6: Take notes on the reading assigned to your group. Then, list the most important takeaways from this reading that your group should explore in its presentation. Use these notes when you meet as a group to create your ten-minute class presentation.

Field Notes Entry 7: Write a couple of paragraphs analyzing the goals and priorities of travel for the particular travelers that are the focus of your group’s article, and compare these with your own goals as a traveler to Italy.

Group Presentations made in class:
Half an hour for group work.
Groups give their presentations, followed by a general discussion.

Class 6:
Reading: None!

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 8: Create a minimum four-page-long, illustrated travel guide that includes at least six sights in Venice that appeal to you. You will be writing these as your twenty-first-century, twenty- something selves with your twenty-first-century tastes, but your audience is one of the following: upper-class, eighteenth-century, northern European males; or first-time, middle-class British travelers living in the nineteenth century.

Class Discussion:
We will share our travel guides and then group-write a second guide, this one written to convince twentieth-first-century travelers to visit the kinds of sites earlier Grand Tour travelers held so dear.

 

Topic Four: Eating Italy
Class 7:
Reading to be completed before class:
Melissa Calaresu, “Thomas Jones’ Neapolitan Kitchen: The Material Cultures of Food on the Grand Tour,” Journal of Early Modern History (2020), 84–102.

The BBC 1957 April Fools Day Joke
1957: The SPAGHETTI HARVEST | Panorama | Classic BBC clips | BBC Archive

Post-War Food pdf: includes
Civilian Food Rations in Britain in 1945.

Elizabeth David, introductions to the 1955 and 1988 editions, in idem, A Book of Mediterranean Food, 4–10.

Elizabeth Parsons, “Land of History and Romance: Consuming Nostalgia Through the British Italian Cookbook,” Advances in Consumer Research, 39 (2011), 392–8.

Merry I. White, “All Roads Lead to Home: Japanese Culinary Tourism in Italy,” in Sylvie Guichard-Anguis and Okpyo Moon, eds., Japanese Tourism and Travel Culture (London, 2009), 203–14.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 9: Take notes on today’s assigned readings. Then write a paragraph reflecting on the relationship described in our readings between food encountered in Italy, nostalgia, and memory.

Field Notes Entry 10: Produce at least a page of words, pictures, and/or lists that document your encounters with Italian food in ways that differ from food encounters at home.

Class 8:
Reading None!

Out-of-the-classroom activity no. 2:
We will not meet in our classroom, but do this instead: If your schedule allows, come shopping in Rialto with the professors and fellow students, and if the class is small enough, we will cook and eat a communal dinner at Professor Fleming’s house.

 

Topic Five: Loving Italy
Class 9:
Reading to be completed before class:
Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, Concerning His Return, read only 217–41.

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, selections.

Max Ryynänen, “From Haunted Ruin to Touristified City,” in Jeanette Bicknell et al.,
Philosophical Perspectives on Ruins, Monuments, and Memorials (New York, 2020), 157–65.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 11: Document your encounter with Italian food and foodways in the Rialto market and/or at our dinner, informed by last week’s reading and our out-of-the-classroom activity.

Field Notes Entry 12: Take notes on this week’s assigned readings. In preparation for today’s discussions, reflect (with the Ryynänen article firmly in mind) on the ways the remains of the distant past shaped Namatianus’s and Goethe’s experience of Italy.

Field Notes Entry 13: Describe, draw, or photograph something that you have encountered in the great Venetian outdoors that was made before 1500, and write something about the ways that encounter is different from encounters you have at home with monuments from the past.

Class 10:
Reading to be completed before class:
Each group will be assigned a different reading. Your group will write a 10-minute presentation (with a PowerPoint, if you would like), which you will use to teach other members of the class what you learned from your reading. After the presentations, we will have a class discussion on the points raised in the presentations and the lessons we can take away from them. You will have the first half an hour of class to go over the final details.

Group One:
Rosemary Sweet, “Experiencing the Grand Tour,” in idem, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy c. 1690–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), read only 23–45.

Group Two:
Jill Steward, “Performing Abroad: British Tourists in Italy and Their Practices, 1840–1914,” in D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren, eds., Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (Oxford, 2004), 53–72.

Group Three:
Andrew Buchanan, “‘I Felt Like a Tourist Instead of a Soldier:’ The Occupying Gaze––War and Tourism in Italy, 1943–1945,” American Quarterly, 68:3 (2016), 593–615.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 14: Take notes on the reading assigned to your group. Then, list the most important takeaways from this reading that your group should explore in its presentation. Use these notes to create your ten-minute class presentation when you meet as a group.

Field Notes Entry 15: Write a reflection on the ways your own national, gender, and social positions are shaping your experience as a traveler in Italy.

Group Presentations made in class:
Half an hour for group work.
Groups give their presentations, followed by a general discussion.

 

Topic Six: Hating Italy: Travel, Chauvinism, Nationalism, Racism
Class 11:
Reading to be completed before class:
Hating Italy pdf, which includes selections from the following: Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae (c. 380).

Tobias Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy (1766).

Selina Bunbury, A Visit to the Catacombs, or First Christian Cemeteries at Rome: and a Midnight Visit to Mount Vesuvius (1849).

Viator Verax, Cautions for the First Tour. On the Annoyances, Short Comings, Indecencies, and Impositions Incidental to Foreign Travel: Addressed to Husbands, Fathers, Brothers, and All Gentlemen Going with Female Relatives on the Continental Excursions (1863), read only 19–21.

Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869). Frances Elliot, Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy, 2 vols. (1872).
D.H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)., 221–2, 312.

Stacia Datskovska, I'm an NYU Student Who Hated My Study-Abroad Semester in Florence Insider (2023).

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 16: take notes on today’s readings. Then create a list of stereotypes travelers in our readings had of the Italians they encountered and what they criticized about them. Then write a paragraph describing your reactions to their depictions.

Field Notes Entry 17: Write a paragraph detailing the critiques the Italians described by this week’s authors might have levied against the travelers they encountered.

Class 12:
Reading to be completed before class:
Joseph Luzzi, “Italy Without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth,” MLN, 117:1 (2002), 48–83, read only 48–57.

Tim Parks, An Italian Education: The Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona (London, 2015), selection.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 18: take notes on today’s readings. At the end of these notes, write at least a paragraph reflecting on the differences between how Tim Parks, as a visitor, thinks about the people he encounters and how the people we read for our last class thought about the Italians they encountered.

Field Notes Entry 19: Think through how your own background, nationality, nationalistic feelings, identity, or homesickness shape your attitudes toward Italians and stand behind some of the critiques you have of the people you encounter. If you are from Italy, ruminated on the biases against Italians in the authors we have read this week.

 

Week of October 30: Midterm Break

 

Topic Seven: Foreign Objects as Travelers
Class 13:
Reading to be completed before class:
“ Venice and the Treasures of the 4th Crusade.”

Field Notes Entry 20: Create a bullet-point list of objects made in Byzantium and brought to Venice during the Fourth Crusade still in Venice.

Out-of-the classroom activity no. 3: Finding foreign objects in Venice
Instead of meeting in our classroom, go to San Marco and document, identify, and take pictures or draw some of the foreign objects incorporated into the fabric of San Marco and its square.

Class 14:
Reading to be completed before class:
Thomas E.A. Dale, “Cultural Hybridity in Medieval Venice,” in Henry Maguire, ed. San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice (Washington, D.C., 2010), 151–91, read only 151–6, 166–9, 182–
91.

Karen Rose Mathews, “Decorating with Things: Spolia as Material Culture in the Italian Maritime Republics, 1100–1300,” BFO, 1 (2015), 4–13.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 21: Take pictures or sketch at least five objects that you identify on San Marco’s facade or in its square that traveled from elsewhere, and speculate on what the people who incorporated this material into Venice’s built environment were trying to say to visitors viewing these buildings.

Field Notes Entry 22: Take notes on today’s reading, and write a paragraph describing how they helped you rethink the meaning of the facade of the building.

Friday on-site no. 4. Extra required event: Trip to San Marco, San Marco Treasury
Reading:
None!

 

Topic Eight: Italian Objects of Desire Taken from Italy
Class 15:
Reading to be completed before class:
Einhard, The Translation of the Relics of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter

Debra J. Birch, “Rome of the Pilgrimage: Part Two,” in idem, s (Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1998), 103–22, read only 116–22.

Verena Krebs, “All the King’s Treasures,” in idem, Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft, and Diplomacy with Latin Europe (Cham, 2021), 18–29.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 23: Take notes on today’s readings. Then create a list of objects travelers in today’s readings wanted to procure in Italy and their motives for wanting what they wanted. Later this week, we will compare these with things Grand Tour visitors wanted from Italy. So, leave two blank pages between this entry and the next entry.

Field Notes Entry 24: Reflect on one of the following two topics: 1) a souvenir you have purchased in Italy and how memories of your stay here might be anchored in that object, or 2) an object that you would like to have purchased, but couldn’t, how you have committed that object to memory, and how your memories of your stay here might be associated with an object that got away.

Class 16:
Reading to be completed before class:
Each group will be assigned a different reading. Your group will write a 10-minute presentation (with a PowerPoint, if you would like), which you will use to teach other members of the class what you learned from your reading. After the presentations, we will have a class discussion on the points raised in the presentations and the lessons we can take away from them. You will have the first half an hour of class to go over the final details.

Group One:
Mariá Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui and Scott Wilcox, “The Westmoreland: Crates, Contents, and Owners,” in idem, eds., The English Prize: The Capture of the Westmoreland: An Episode of the Grand Tour (New Haven, 2012), 11–28. [scan at home]

Group Two:
Emma Gleadhill, “Shopping for Souvenirs,” Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750–1830 (Manchester, 2022), 56–73.

Group Three:
Sarah Benson, “Reproduction, Fragmentation, and Collection: Rome and the Origin of Souvenirs,” in D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren, eds., Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place (Oxford, 2004), 15–36.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 25: Take notes on today’s readings in preparation for your group presentation. Then, list the most important takeaways from this reading that you think your group should explore in its presentation. Use these notes when you meet as a group to put create your class presentation.

Field Notes Entry 26: Return to the blank pages after Field Notes Entry 23, and do the following: make a list of objects Grand Tour travelers wanted from Italy. Compare the two lists and write about what has changed and the focus and scale of these two sets of desires.

Class Presentations:
Half an hour of group work.
Groups give their presentations, followed by a general discussion.

 

Topic Nine: Visiting and Collecting Wonderland
Class 17:
Reading to be completed before class:
Paola Bertucci, “Back from Wonderland: Jean Antoine Nollet’s Italian Tour (1749),” in
R.J.W. Evans and Alexander Marr, eds., Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Abingdon, 2006), 194–212.

What Is a Wunderkammer? Best Cabinets of Curiosities

Video: Cabinet of Curiosities Identity and Power

Field Notes Entry 27: Take notes on this week’s assigned readings and video. In preparation for today’s discussions, write a paragraph reflecting on the objects of wonder collected in Italy.

Field Notes Entry 28: In words and pictures, create a 21st-century cabinet of curiosities containing objects you have encountered in Venice, making sure that it includes examples of all four categories of curiosities––naturalia, artificialia, exotica, and scientifica.

Class 18:
Reading to be completed before class:
Glynis Ridley, “One of a Kind: Clara the Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Venice and the Tale of a Missing Horn,” Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption, 8:1 (2021), 41–85.

Claudia Mattos, “The Torchlight Visit: Guiding the Eye Through Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Antique Sculpture Galleries,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 49– 50:1 (2006), 139–50.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 29: Take notes on today’s readings.

Field Notes Entry 30: Write a paragraph on the following: What is the experience of the non-human visitor to Italy?

On-site activity no 5: Required extra Friday event: San Marco by candlelight.

 

Topic Ten: Surviving War in Italy
Class 19:
Reading to be completed before class:
War memoirs pdf includes selections from:
Iris Origo, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (New York, 2019). Norman Lewis, Naples ‘44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy (London, 1978).

Watch:

Roman treasures damaged by war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbSFMUcabnU
War Damage in Palermo, Sicily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmFL1yFq8m4
The Bombing of Pompeii: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFIApliDvec

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 31: Our tour of San Marco by candlelight has allowed us to see what the interiors of great buildings looked like before electrification. Write about the experience of San Marco by candlelight, with reference to the Mattos reading, and compare it with your experience of the building during the day with electric lights.

Field Notes Entry 32 Take notes on today’s assigned readings and videos. Write a paragraph or two reflecting on why some ruins––like those of ancient Rome––are evocative and romantic, and others–– like the ruined Italian cities in WWII––are horrifying and tragic.

Class 20:
Watch:
Movie: Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna:
Miracle at St. Anna Full Movie | Best Action Full Movies

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 33: In preparation for today’s discussions, reflect on how the experiences of the soldiers in Spike Lee’s movie can be put in conversation with the writings of other travelers we have read. And think about the ways that racism, as well as war, shaped their experience of Italy.

 

Topic 11: Unwilling Visitors I: Captives and the Enslaved
Class 21:
Reading to be completed before class:
Each group will be assigned a different reading. Your group will write a 10-minute presentation (with a PowerPoint, if you would like), which you will use to teach other members of the class what you learned from your reading. After the presentations, we will have a class discussion on the points raised in the presentations and the lessons we can take away from them. You will have the first half an hour of class to go over the final details.

Group One:
Kate Lowe, “The Lives of African Slaves and People of African Descent in Renaissance Europe,” in Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, 2012), read only 13–29.

Group Two:
Justine A. Walden, “Muslim Slaves in Early Modern Rome,” 298–303, 307–310, 322–3.

Group Three:
Sally McKee, “Domestic Slavery in Renaissance Italy,” Slavery and Abolition, 29:3 (2008), 305–322.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 34: Take notes on the reading assigned to your group. List the most important takeaways from this reading that your group should explore in its presentation. Use these notes to create your ten-minute class presentation when you meet as a group.

Field Note Entry 35: Write a reflection on how the memories of the enslaved are preserved or erased in Venice.

Class Presentations:
Half an hour for group work.
Groups give their presentations, followed by a general discussion.

Class 22:
Reading to be completed before class:
Each group will be assigned a different reading. Your group will write a 10-minute presentation (with a PowerPoint, if you would like), which you will use to teach other members of the class what you learned from your reading. After the presentations, we will have a class discussion on the points raised in the presentations and the lessons we can take away from them. You will have the first half an hour of class to go over the final details.

Group One:
Global Slavery Index: Italy: https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country- studies/italy/

Group Two:
Ruggero Scaturro, “Modern Slavery Made in Italy––Causes and Consequences of Labour Exploitation in the Italian Agricultural Sector,” Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 3:2 (2021), 181–9.

Tobias Jones and Ayo Awokoya, “Are Your Tinned Tomatoes Picked by Slave Labour,” Guardian, 20 June 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/tomatoes-italy- mafia-migrant-labour-modern-slavery.

Group Three:
Alessandra Gissi, “Foreign Nannies and Maids: A Historical Perspective on Female Immigration and Domestic Work in Italy (1960–1970), in Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ed., Gender and Migration in Historical Perspective (Palgrave, 2022), 123–46.

Field Notes Entry 36: Take notes on today’s readings in preparation for your group presentation. Then, list the most important takeaways from this reading that you think your group should explore in its presentation. Use these notes to create your class presentation when you meet as a group.

Field Notes Entry 37: Reflect on how today’s unwilling travelers to Italy have been absent from your Field Notes and why this is so.

Field Notes Entry 38: Return to the blank pages after Field Notes Entry 4, and write some of the people we have read about this week back into Venice.

 

Topic 12: Unwilling and Unwanted Visitors II: Refugees and Aliens
Class 23:
Reading to be completed before class:
Maaza Mengiste, “This is What the Journey Does,” in Viet Thanh Nguyen, ed., The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (New York, 2018), 1–4.
Luigi Marfè, “Italian Counter-Travel Writing: Images of Italy in Contemporary Migration Literature,” Studies in Travel Writing, 16:2 (2012), 191–201.
Jan Morris, The World of Venice, 17–26, 94–102.
Jan Morris, “One Night at the Risiera,” in idem, Triest and the Meaning of Nowhere.

Writing to be completed before class:
Field Notes Entry 39: Take notes on this week’s assigned readings. In preparation for today’s discussions, think through how the experiences of unwilling visitors to Italy differ from those visitors who choose to come.

Field Notes Entry 40: Choose one of the images in the “Unwilling Travelers” GooglePhoto gallery, pair it with one of the readings, and write a meditation on unwilling travelers to Italy.

Class 24:
Reading:
None!

Reflections on willing and unwilling travelers to Italy. General Discussion.

Field Notes Entry 41: Write at least a page reflecting on how and why the insights and observations in your Field Notes Journal are similar to and/or different from the writings of the visitors to Italy whose writings we have read this semester.

 

Finals Week
Presentation of Field Notes Journals: Choose four of your most evocative, thought-provoking, or interesting Field Note entries, and present them to the class.

Course Field Notes Journal
I will take a quick look at your field note entries at the beginning of every class, and by the end of the semester, the final journal I will examine will be comprised of a minimum of 60 pages. I encourage you to include illustrations, photos, maps, lists, etc., but I expect English text as well.

What is a Field Notes Journal?
1. It is a sequential, dated chronicle of events, observations, ideas, and readings, as well as your reflections on them.

2. The act of consistently writing down in a single booklet your ideas, observations, and reflections on history, on course readings, and on life as a traveler in Italy are acts of thinking and remembering and will help you understand what you are learning both in this class on travelers to Italy and as a traveler to Italy.

University education aims to create thoughtful, open-minded, curious and idea-driven human beings.
1. Field Note Journals play an essential role in such an education because disciplined writing helps you reflect. The American philosopher John Dewey believed that the function of this kind of writing was the “restructuring and reorganization of experiences, which adds meaning to the experience.”

2. The constant but informal writing and reflection will allow you to be curious and exploratory. They will help you connect what you are learning/reading in class to your experiences outside the classroom.

3. It also creates a record you can go back to, reflect on, and reconsider long after you return home.

4. It provides a place to think about how the past impacts your present.

5. Its looser format allows for the possibility of juxtaposing words and ideas with drawings, maps, paintings, or photographs. It encourages authors to pay attention to page layouts and treat blocks of text more creatively.

What goes in your field notes journal?
1. You will leave a couple of pages blank at the beginning of your journal, which you will eventually use for a table of contents.

2. Most weeks, you will write four assigned Field Note entries.

3. All class notes on assigned readings are counted as Field Note entries and will be written in your Field Notes Journal (added sequentially and dated)––this includes notes on readings, critical reflections about readings, and the notes you make for group work.

4. It will include other entries reflecting on non-classroom experiences, particularly the five outside-the-classroom activities integral to this class.

What does a Field Note Entry look like?
1. It is generally anywhere from a paragraph to two pages long, at least half of which is text. Every entry is dated.

2. The prose is more informal and less polished than a standard class paper.
a. You can also go back and make corrections or amendments by hand or on the computer and are welcome to show your writing process. So, if you want to show process over tidiness, that is fine. Then again, you can go back and polish, edit, add, or change your mind.

3. Field Note entries are flexible and accommodate different kinds of entries, page layouts, and illustrations.

4. Like many of the writings of travelers to Italy assigned in this class, your Field Note Journals are public-facing. Their content will be available to me, and I will occasionally ask you to share entries with classmates.

5. Your Field Notes Journal is also archival. At the end of the semester, you will have a significant, thoughtful, and chronologically organized set of observations and reflections on this class and your time in Italy.

In what do I write my journal? You have several choices:
1. You can physically write a hard-copy journal. If this is your choice, please purchase a plain paper notebook (no lined paper, please; heavier paper is better than light paper).

2. Or, you can create a virtual journal.
a. If you have an Apple device, you can use GoodNotes. GoodNotes allows you to create three notebooks free of charge, so you do not have to purchase the app, although you can if you like.
b. If you have a PC, you can download and use PaperStreet Journal, a free app.
c. You can create your Field Notes as a Google Doc.
d. You can create your journal as a Microsoft Word document.
e. If you are already familiar with another journaling app, you can use that one.

 

 

 

Last updated: July 4, 2023