About

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

This site presents a corpus of English travel writings (reports, diaries, collections of letters, guidebooks) published between the end of the XIX Century and the beginning of the XX Century, which we have retrieved from freely available sources and we release in an XML format.

We choose this period because in the second half of the XIX Century the institution of the Grand Tour declined and leisure-oriented tourists travels emerged. This radical transformation was enabled by technological, economic and sociological, factors: e.g., the development of steam-powered ships and of the railway network, the growth of Anglo-American economy, a greater emancipation of women with more female travelers. Moreover, after unification, new routes to Southern Italy and the islands were opened, so that the traveler's attention was no longer limited to the classic destinations in the North and Central Italy, such as Venice, Florence and Rome.

The authors of the selected texts belong to different nationalities (UK, US, Ireland, Australia) and are both male and female. Some books dwell on specific cities or regions, others cover different parts of Italy. Although we made an effort to have a diverse, well-balanced corpus in terms of content, author's gender and nationality, this was only partially possible because of the limited availability of online travel books whose text is freely available and cleaned from OCR errors.

The collection of the corpus is still ongoing: please, contact us (rachele.sprugnoli[AT]unicatt[DOT]it) if you have suggestions about new texts to be added.

Site created by Rachele Sprugnoli - Twitter: @RSprugnoli