Contemporary British Travel Writing on Italy and British Broadsheets: Tobias Jones, John Hooper and Tim Parks

Kate Willman

doi:10.3828/mlo.v0i0.159

Abstract

The objects of analysis here are recent, well-known texts about Italy by authors who work for broadsheet newspapers, and whose work, in turn, is promoted in those same broadsheets for a predominantly middle-class audience interested in, or most likely travelling to, Italy. The article aims to highlight the dangers of the symbiotic relationship between these texts and the British press, given that they tend to perpetuate over-simplifications and stereotypes about Italy versus Britain that have existed at least since the growth of tourism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The texts analysed here – The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, The Italians by John Hooper and Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education by Tim Parks – were chosen due to their popularity and their authors’ visibility as commentators on Italian issues. These authors tend to display a lack of awareness of (or desire to ignore) their positioning and the ways in which their work often promotes an agenda of northern European superiority that has evolved, but not significantly altered, in the last two hundred years or so. The article reveals an unsettling alliance between these British commentators on Italy and the newspapers that are supposed to provide accurate information on, and may shape policy towards, Italy.

Highlights

At least since the era of the Grand Tour, Italy has been a particular source of fascination in the British imagination
The objects of analysis in this article are recent, well-known texts about Italy: The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, The Italians by John Hooper, and Italian Neighbours and An Italian Education by Tim Parks. These texts vary in tone, showing the elastic nature of travel writing as a genre; ‘the beggar of literary forms: it borrows from the memoir, reportage and, most important, the novel’ (Buford 1984: 7)
We shall certainly see these dynamics at work in the writers addressed here, who write from privileged positions to a largely privileged audience, and often promote an agenda of northern European superiority that has evolved, but not significantly altered, in the last two hundred years or so