Home and away: Tuscan abodes and Italian Others in contemporary travel writing

This essay examines the representation of the house and 'Italian-ness' in contemporary American travel writing set in Tuscany, historically a popular destination for the foreign tourist. In analysing Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun (1996) and David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell's In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany (2001), it argues that this more recent kind of 'settlement' narrative can be classified as a sub-genre of travel writing and that through the trope of the house, the writers attempt to negotiate their own sense of belonging to Italian culture, while renovating their abode and, presumably, themselves. Yet their actual engagement with Italian society is limited, and their texts consistently represent Italians as 'Others', reiterating standard colonialist stereotyping of the native. Drawing on theories of alterity (e.g. Fabian's), the essay illustrates the ways in which the writers typecast Italians while detailing their relationship with their new homes, thus capitalising on popular representations of foreign real estate acquisition and house restoration, resulting however in texts which do little to renew the genre itself.