Strickingly Beautiful? Bologna in the eyes of five English female travel writers between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries

Abstract

The present study investigates the letters written by Anne Miller, Mary Berry, Mariana Starke, Mary Shelley and Frances Trollope after their Grand Tour of Italy between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries. Its aim is to find eventual recurrent elements in the depiction of the city of Bologna, which was a minor, however crucial stop in the Grand Tour across the Peninsula. After presenting two chapters respectively devoted to the typical elements of male and female Grand Tours and to the general characteristics of their writings, the corpus will be presented. It is presented following a chronological order, and is analysed in terms of content and language. In particular, the choices made by the five, aforementioned female authors will be discussed and compared in order to find eventual recurrent elements or differences in the description of Bologna. Despite the similar itinerary followed and the same places seen during the visit of the city, the study shows different ways of looking and judging the same city across a span of approximately eighty years, and give important hints of how Bologna was seen from foreigners and especially by women travel writers.