Nella mente di Sir Richard F. Burton, Patrick Leigh Fermor e Bruce Chatwin: note sul viaggio e la Modernità

In the minds of Sir Richard F. Burton, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin: some notes on travel and modernity – A necessary step to interpret the relationship between travel and Modernity is through the analysis of those travellers who walked along the path of the historical and cultural disruption that began in the 15th century in Italy, when Ptolemy’s Geographia was rediscovered. The drive towards exploration with the aim of filling the gaps in the representation of the Earth – following the new idea of modern space which was brought up by Ptolemy – is crowded along the centuries with figures who, throughout their lives, welded the discovery of the world to the romantic subject bearing the name of Mankind. In the 19th century, the elite phenomenon of traveling gives way to the involvement of the middle class – previously excluded – also thanks to the improvement of new tools for reading the world (i.e. the travel guide, whose fundamental archetypes are those of Baedeker and Murray). At the same time, a new model of man on the move was emerging among travelers who detached themselves from the growing tourism industry and were committed to continuing the mission of exploring the world but at the speed and with the amount of voracity that the century allowed in that time. Sir Richard F. Burton is perhaps the most complex and complete example of a traveler transiting between the territories of the world and those of literature, languages and “the different ways that men have of being men”. Inspired by his figure, his successors Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin will deepen the relationship between body, mind and travel, giving rise to the most original examples of nomadic travelers. In the first part of this work, the origin of the first tourist guides is traced as well as the standardizing functions they exercise on the reality they describe, such as Central Europe in the case of Baedeker. In the second part, through the reconstruction of the thoughts and steps of the travelers mentioned, we will try to grasp the most recent passages of the modern evolution of the traveler’s mind.