Figuring Emerging Forms of Experiential Tourism in Italy in the American Literary Imagination from the Civil War to the Present Age

Experiential and sustainable travel is a most innovative, interesting, and fast-developing trend in contemporary tourism. This contribution contends that embryonic forms of experimental tourism can be detected in literary travelogues, from the nineteenth century onward. Tourism, a central feature of modernity, played a key role also in the American literary imagination. Discussing the representation of tourism in canonical and contemporary U.S. texts (N. Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun; M. Twain’s Innocents Abroad; H. James’s Daisy Miller; E. Wharton’s Roman Fever; and V. Martin’s Italian Fever), I argue that the traditional literary theme of the Italian journey revised and rewritten by American authors is particularly revealing of the manifold ways in which a timeworn and clichéd tourist experience can acquire different meanings and build ever-new, deeply meaningful experiences, while, at the same time, signaling the gradual emergence of a novel tourist figure we call the experiential tourist.