Mapping the Grand Tour Travel Writings: a GIS-Based Inventorying and Spatial Analysis for Digital Humanities in Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy (XVI-XIX c.)

Literary GIS has emerged as a new pioneering approach, a field of study in literary geography that aims at bridging texts with places/spaces through the digitisation of literary works. It aims for a better understanding of the text/place/space nexus, including landscape and territorial history, using quantitative and comparative approaches and strategies of dissemination. This paper provides an early-stage report on the development of a literary GIS of Trentino-Alto Adige (Italy) based on Grand Tour travel writings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. These texts, including reports and some early examples of tourist guides, represent valuable sources of information about the people, the spaces described, and the cultures within which the writings were framed. The specific case study of Trentino-Alto Adige has been selected because the area was one of the most important gateways for travellers coming from Northern Europe who intended to visit Italy. As a first step, over 250 passages from travel writings were collected, digitised and georeferenced. The paper presents the sources, as well as the developed inventory sheets and the GIS structures. The result is a comprehensive geodatabase that can be used for micro and macro analysis, in terms of: identification of historical routes and citation clusters; spatial comparisons of the different sites cited in the literary passages; also analysing and mapping references to textual elements that refer to landscapes, societies and cultures. In the next phase, the geodatabase will first be enriched with additional authors, then published online, in order to develop a Literary Atlas of Grand Tour travellers in Trentino-Alto Adige and to facilitate literary, geographical and historical research on the corpus, on local landscapes and societies of the past and on travels’ attitude and praxis.