Investigation of significant genres and modes of writing as they recur in the course of Italian cultural history.

The course raises a number of geopolitical and socio-cultural questions related to the artistic representation of the sea and literary geography from Dante to Petrarca’s Itinerary to the Holy Land, Boccaccio and Fazio Degli Uberti’s Dittamondo, with the aim to engage students in a reading of the sea, through a geocritical and spatial approach. Those writers put forward cartographic writing, a description of the world based on and around the representation and a map of the Mediterranean; therefore, the first question raised by this course is what a difference the sea makes in those texts, and what do those maps tell us about the writers and the world they were living in; secondly, how the Mediterranean sea helped to shape culturally and geographically the spaces and places of civilization, as well as spaces of ‘alterity’ showing that both geography and poetry, places and stories, contribute to the narration of human history. In this sense, a focus will be on the representation of the Orient, Islam and islands. Reading and discussing Buondelmonti and Bordone’s Islands Books aim to further address the sea of paper as a sea of power, to recognize the power of map and the power of literature, to rethink the geographic and cultural role of the artistic Mediterranean (in literature and visual arts), and maps in shaping the construction of the cultural Other and spaces of Otherness. Finally, the course intends to offer through texts and images a new approach to travel and discovery by reading the Mediterranean as a literary space, a productive space of global meanings, and a humanistic space, a space that narrates human history and the Story of mankind.

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