Obserwacja i refleksja — dwie relacje „turystów” z Hiszpanii w XVIII wieku

Abstract

Travel accounts of Spain in the Age of Enlightenment are rare. The author investigates two nearly simultaneously produced travel accounts from the early 1760s: one by an Italian, Giuseppe Antonio Baretti, who went from Lisbon to Italy, and another by an Englishman, Edward Clarke, who travelled across Spain in the opposite direction. The two travellers differed in their perspec-tives: they noticed, appreciated and commented on different social situations, political events and personal encounters which occurred during their journeys. They had different culturally--oriented mindsets and stores of memories, which they conveyed in the printed accounts that they published. The Italian expatriate returning home from London emphasized aspects of Iberian culture different from those noticed by the British official (an embassy chaplain) com-pleting his mission. The author tries to establish the reasons of the differences and similarities in their views, asking whether one of them was that the Englishman pursued an established tradition of report-type travel writing while the Italian ventured to combine observation with a personal and subjective commentary.