Percorsi casuali. La percezioni di Bari e della Puglia nella letteratura di viaggio di lingua tedesca del XV e XVI secolo

This paper aims to examine a series of pilgrimage reports originally written in the German language between the second half of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century. It is a text type that has increasingly been the main topic of several studies about travel literature, facilitated by a range of new paradigms that the so-called “cultural turn” has brought to the attention of the critical discourse. However, the theme here chosen, in part, lies outside the concrete phenomena taken into account by those studies. The choice, in fact, has fallen only on those texts that show a specific variation of the ‘standard model’, telling about stops in Puglia, and in particular giving information on the Ionian-Adriatic related urban centers (Bari, Brindisi, Otranto, Taranto, and Gallipoli). The Apulian stop regularly occurs on the way back, after visiting the canonical places of Palestine, and represents an unexpected experience, due to adverse conditions (especially meteorological), as an alternative to the ordinary route across the sea. From this specific corpus three works are analyzed: they represent also three text types, within the common literary genre as it develops in the field of the German language. The authors of the first two (Dietrich von Schach-ten and Bernhard von Hirschfeld) were knights, therefore representatives of the lesser nobility, a social class that, in the wake of values and ideas of the previous Crusades, was particularly active in pilgrimages to Jerusalem. In the first case, it was a text commissioned by the feudal lord, in the second one it was definitely an autobiographical writing. The third text, Die Sionspilger by Felix Fabri, a renowned Dominican writer, belongs to a different subgenre, that is the one of pilgrimage guides. As such, it did not aim at providing useful information for those who had decided to make a similar journey, nor was grounded on an empiric personal experience, as the other two. Rather, it suggested some spiritual itineraries, among which also an Apulian path, as an appendix to Santa Maria di Loreto pilgrimage in the Marche region. As the analysis shows, the concrete news provided about the corresponding Apulian locations substantially reflect these three different formulations. Especially in the first two examined texts, there is a perception of the places visited, in which the acquired and, so to speak, already established knowledge (i.e. the news about the St. Nicholas’ sepulcher in Bari) mixes with fresh news, sometimes quite specific, chosen by the authors according to their personal and empirical experience, sometimes overlapping these ones.