Travel, modernity and rural landscapes in nineteenth-century Liguria

Piana, Pietro; Watkins, Charles; Balzaretti, Ross

Abstract

New roads and later railways were essential for the modernisation and rapid economic development of North-western Italy in the early nineteenth century. The new routes also encouraged an increasing number of foreign travellers to visit the region. They opened up fresh tracts of countryside and provided novel viewpoints and points of interest; many travellers took the opportunity to record these views with topographical drawings and watercolours. In this paper we make use of some of these views to examine how the modernized transport routes released new places to be celebrated by tourists and became themselves features and objects of especial interest and comment. We examine the works of three artists, one English and two Italian, who depicted landscapes of contrasting rural Ligurian landscapes. Their drawings and prints are contextualised and interpreted with maps, field data, archival documents and contemporary descriptions of roads and railways by travellers and in guidebooks.

Citation

Piana, P., Watkins, C., & Balzaretti, R. (2018). Travel, modernity and rural landscapes in nineteenth-century Liguria. Rural History, 29(2), 167-193. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793318000079

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 6, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Sep 10, 2018
• Publication Date: Oct 31, 2018
• Deposit Date: Apr 17, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 10, 2018
• Journal: Rural History
• Print ISSN: 0956-7933
• Electronic ISSN: 1474-0656
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 29
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 167-193
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793318000079
• Keywords: Geography, Planning and Development; Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); History; Urban Studies
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/924099
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/rural-history/article/travel-modernity-and-rural-landscapes-in-nineteenthcentury-liguria/10657BFEA00933A8E3471F52B386E25D
• Related Public URLs: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/rural-history
• Additional Information: © Cambridge University Press 2018