Jardin d’Italie: Voyageurs français à la découverte de l’art de vivre (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jardin d’Italie: Voyageurs français à la découverte de l’art de vivre Pamela Shuggi (bio) Giovanni Dotoli. Jardin d’Italie: Voyageurs français à la découverte de l’art de vivre. Pref. Yves Bonnefoy. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Giovanni Dotoli’s Jardin d’Italie: Voyageurs français à la découverte de l’art de vivre is of interest to a wide variety of readers, including scholars ranging from medievalists to modernists, but may also appeal to anyone with an affinity for literary travel as well as travel literature. Yves Bonnefoy’s preface is succinct and successfully prepares the reader for Dotoli’s text. One of the greatest and most interesting aspects of Dotoli’s text is his balance between broad historical coverage and deep examination of specific works of travel literature such as works by Michel de Montaigne, François René de Chateaubriand, and Jean Cocteau. He effectively integrates the historical, artistic and cultural aspects of the magnetism that pulls French travelers to Italy in order to reveal its promise as a garden of origin, beauty and vivacity. His central metaphor of Italy as a mythical garden is well established through the aforementioned themes and documented in a way that integrates both primary and secondary sources. Dotoli skillfully and artfully weaves an abundance of information into ten flowing chapters, each of which comes to establish and describe an aspect of the title phrase “Jardin d’Italie.” The chapters can be readily approached through these themes. In the first chapter, “Désir d’Italie,” Dotoli lays the groundwork for his metaphor of Italy as a garden for European, and particularly French, travelers. It is a garden in the sense that it is a dream; a seductive, light-filled one. In the second chapter, “Jardin d’Italie,” Dotoli goes on to explain why the concept of such a dream is central to the conception of Italy as a garden. He highlights that Italy is considered the land of beauty, that the “Bel paese” owes its name to the eternal dream that is associated with it. In the third chapter, “Arcadie et nostalgie,” Dotoli goes on to connect the eternity of this dream back to Genesis. Dotoli wonders if Guinevere and Lancelot did not dream of Italy, if traveling to Italy was not an epic journey to the East. He asks whether French travelers would not have embarked on a journey to Italy in search of their origin. In the fourth chapter, “Jardin du soleil,” Dotoli explains how sun and light specifically came to affect how French travelers viewed the Italian landscape and consequently Italy itself, which leads very smoothly into his discussion of Italy as the heart of the North-South dichotomy in chapter five, “Art de vivre.” What follows in this chapter is a thorough description of the inherent mixture of “North” and “South” that constitutes Italian culture and French travelers’ attraction and positive reaction to it. In the sixth chapter, “Jardin du temps. Au fil des siècles,” Dotoli returns to the historical aspect of his argumentation as he recounts the history of French travel to Italy from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and the resulting literature. He emphasizes that religious motivations made travel to Italy from France in the Middle Ages, including missions of evangelization as [End Page 1026] well as the Crusades, far more frequent then we might imagine. Dotoli notes that it was at that time that literature became “un acte de viaticum, de via, de voie et de route, par migrations et conquêtes” (115). Dotoli highlights that the sixteenth century brought profound changes, first as a result of the influences of humanism, and then later on with the advent of the travel journal. He illustrates how seventeenth-century travel literature moved toward interpretation and the eighteenth century brought about a deeper interest in the actuality of Italian life, in accordance with the Enlightenment. Dotoli gives an especially interesting account of how Italy began as a model for French travelers and of the importance it later acquired for French Romantics during the nineteenth century. Dotoli maintains that the myth of the garden continued into the twentieth century, in the hopes...