Travelling South: Charles Lister, Henry Vollan Morton, Patience Gray between Late Meridionism and Anti-Progressism

This chapter aims to examine the north-south European relationship through contemporary travel writing, especially that which depicts the Italian South. Italy and the Mediterranean have ‘always’ been the objective of Northern travellers. In the past, the European South was a sort of inner Orient, against which Northern European identity could perceive itself as a modern and, therefore superior world. Terms like “change”, “innovation”, “progress” on one hand, and “immobility”, “tradition” and “backwardness” on the other, have effortlessly been attributed to the two geo-cultural spaces. However, I would employ the term Meridionism (M. Pfister, L. Cazzato) rather than Orientalism (E. Said). If Orientalism was born as a cultural tool for the implementation of European colonialism, Meridionism was born as a cultural tool for the foundation of modern European identity. The present essay first tries to reflect on the relationship between travel writing and cultural identity followed by an examination of some travelogues written in the second half of the 20th century by acclaimed English travel writers; specifically Charles Lister, Henry Vollan Morton and Patience Gray. I will attempt to reconstruct a multi-focalised perspective on ‘reality’, in order to observe the extent to which Meridionism is still working as a discursive tool for the negotiation of present cultural identity within Europe.