Education, Pilgrimage and Pleasure: The Rhetorical Strategies in the Writings of Three Eighteenth-century Swedish Travellers to Italy

Abstract

"The article focuses on the rhetorical strategies used by three early eighteenth-century Swedish travellers to convey their image of Italy. Departing from Chloe Chard’s idea of a particular “imaginative topography”, designating the rhetorical and theoretical strategies used by Grand Tour travellers to describe a foreign and unfamiliar landscape, I analyse letters and memoirs by the three Swedish in order to show how their experience of Italy are presented and transformed in relation to the conditions and motives preceding their journeys.The three personalities I consider – scientist Anders Celsius (1701-1744), count Nils Bielke (1706-1765) and admiral Carl Tersmeden (1715-1797) – were all, in different ways, representative of a particular period in Swedish history, the Age of Liberty (“Frihetstiden”, 1719-1772), that was characterised by fervent cultural and political debates leading to important reforms. The particularities of this time are evident in the travel writings of Celsius, Bielke and Tersmeden. Their often contradictory experiences of Italy are described through hyperboles, similitudes, and other rhetorical devices to express feelings of admiration and, at the same time, dissociation. How these feelings are conveyed in the different texts, with which aims, and, in particular, with which rhetorical strategies, are the questions I direct to their writings in order to present their images of Italy in the Age of Liberty. "