By the Ionian Sea. L'arte dello storytelling per il turismo sostenibile

In an article on The Art and Heart of Travel Storytelling (2015) written for «National Geographic», Don George offered an interesting contribution to the definition of travel storytelling by arguing that the primary mission of a storyteller is «to see keenly, taste keenly, hear keenly, smell keenly, feel keenly». Indeed a successful travel writer’s story depends on the quality and authenticity of the travel experience itself, as good travel writing is built upon the interplay between the traveller’s journey in the outer world and the complementary journey in his/her inner world. Furthermore, he suggested that a good storyteller «must first cultivate the fine art of vulnerability», as it is only by opening up to the visited place that a traveller can produce effective travel writing. Again, it is only by being vulnerable that travel storytellers can connect with the places and people they write about, and – as a consequence – connect their reader to those places and people too. It is against this background that the present paper investigates By the Ionian Sea (1901), a piece of travel writing by Victorian realist novelist George Gissing, from the perspective of contemporary storytelling. As the last of the 19th century British travellers to have visited the South, in his work Gissing provides his readers with «Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy», as the book’s subtitle reads, i.e. a digressive erratic form of narration which is also a private quest. As discussed in the paper, Gissing’s travels to the shores of the Ionian Sea, and his visit to the towns that once were part of the Magna Grecia, is in the first place a typical attempt to go back to the source of classical beauty. However, as has been argued in the central section of the paper, Gissing soon becomes aware of the fact that in these lands beauty has been partly destroyed by the new myths of modernity and has given way to «the mechanic triumph of to-day». One of the most significant examples for this is the new Arsenal in Taranto, a «mass of ugly masonry» built where ancient heaps of murex shells used to make the town a proud competitor of Tyre in the production of purple. Finally, Gissing observes the local people’s exterior as well as inner features with great sympathy adopting a participant observer’s gaze. In this way he proves to be interested not only in landscape but also - and most significantly – in what can be termed as «ethnoscape» and «spirit of the place». Especially when getting in touch with fishermen and peasants, Gissing seems to be open and vulnerable to the fascination 278 of a different life-style – slower and in harmony with nature. His brief considerations on such aspects actually appear to be anticipations of a more modern discourse on ecology and sustainability. Thus, the art of travel storytelling, as exemplified by Gissing in these brief notes, can well be considered as a good example of ways to tell about a place that are based on the authenticity of experience. These forms of storytelling contribute to reviving the experience of the genius loci of many places, and can serve the needs of more sustainable, responsible forms of tourism.