Eat, Pray, Buy a House: Utopian Visions of Italy in the New Millennium

Abstract

This article explores the peculiar combination of literary memoir, utopian dream and material culture that sprung from a number of books written about Italy (living in Italy, buying a home in Italy, moving back to Italy) in the new millennium. The famous <i>Under the Tuscan Sun</i>, published in 1996, constitutes one of the earliest and most famous examples of this new genre. According to the Tuscan Sun book, it is not longer enough to travel somewhere, but the traveler needs to commune with the land by owning a piece of it. While relatively new, this particular sub-genre, defined by a critic “brick and mortar travel memoir,” has yielded insightful analyses about travels and the encounters with the other in the 21st Century. Memoirs about living, as foreigners, in contemporary Italy are weaved with the utopian dream of finding something in Italy something real: a real sense of community, real food, real feelings, plus a landscape where human interventions have been gentle and capable of creating real beauty. The article examines a number of memoirs written in recent years about Italy. This analysis is conducted primarily from the point of view of utopian studies, but it also explores issues of authenticity and materiality, thereby offering an analysis of the way Italy is nowadays perceived, imagined and idealized in contemporary travel literature.