Conference. Experiencing Florence: American Travelers’ Accounts and Representations of the City from the Grand Tour to Mass Tourism

Experiencing Florence: American Travelers’ accounts and Representations of the City from the Grand Tour to Mass Tourism

Monday, 11 March 2013, 4:00pm, ACCENT Study Center, Piazza Santo Spirito 10

This talk will discuss the experience of Florence as conveyed by American visitors in their representations and accounts of the city from the time of the Grand Tour to mass society tourism and to the so-called experiential tourist of our days. Travelers’ impressions, stereotypes and idealized visions about Florence and its inhabitants will be discussed through the analysis of sources taken from both high and popular culture from the late 18th to the 21st centuries, including paintings, prints, travel literature, tourist guides and postcards. Special emphasis will be placed on the multi-sensorial dimension of the travelers’ accounts. Though vision is at the center of the tourist’s experience, tourism cannot be reduced to the interpretative model of the ‘tourist gaze’, as tasting, smelling, hearing and touching are involved in its doings.

Nicoletta Leonardi (Ph.D. University College London) is professor of art history and the history of photography at Italian state Academies of Fine Arts, having so far taught in Turin, Florence and Naples.  She is associate curator of photography at a.titolo, a non-profit organization that commissions public art projects based on policies of active citizenship. Her research topics include the relationship between vision and technology in nineteenth century American landscape culture, photographs as material objects and as agents of sociability, pre-cinema practices of immersive viewing and virtual traveling through images, women photographers in Italy, the role of photography as a tool for research and action within contemporary urban planning. She has held several fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship and a Hasselblad Foundation Fellowship. Her writings have been published in exhibition catalogues, most recently Concrete: Photography and Architecture (Wintherthur Fotomuseum/Scheidegger & Spiess, 2013), Franco Vaccari's Exhibitions in Real Time (Spazio Oberdan/Damiani, Milan 2007), Masterpieces From the Guggenheim Collection (Guggenheim Publications/Skira 2005), De l’Europe: photographies, essaies, histoires (Luxemburg/Filigranes Editions, 2007). She is the author of Il paesaggio americano dell’Ottocento: pittori fotografi e pubblico (Donzelli Editore, Rome 2003), and the editor of L’altra metà dello sguardo: le donne nella storia della fotografia (Agorà, Turin 2001) and Feedback. Scritti su e di Franco Vaccari (Postmedia Books, Milano 2007).