![]() ![]() ![]() Travellers and sojourners come to Florence with a set of expectations shaped through filmic and literary representations and see what they expect to see, not least because the Italians are equally complicit in performing their part in this ritualised experience.I was well into adulthood before I realized that I was an American. Contemporary experiences of Florence and Tuscany continue to be shaped by the social imaginary inherited from the early nineteenth century. If so, there is nothing new “Under the Tuscan Sun”: the Grand Tour narrative is alive and kicking. ![]() Is it possible to discern any shared, collective representations? If so, how do such myths fit into the contemporary everyday life of the city? Can we identify a pathway from the aesthetic quest for “authentic” Italian life to cultural encounters with Italians in the flesh? My hypothesis is that one of the leitmotifs of foreigners’ experiences is a romantic, and to a lesser degree, intellectual approach towards “Florence without Florentines”. In this article I explore various current myths that lead foreigners, especially North Europeans and North Americans, to choose to visit/live in Florence or Tuscany for a while or forever. Their deep immersion in place enables the production of situated readings of Italy, Italians and Italianness that avoid essentialising otherness through the recognition of dialogical subjectivities. By re-positioning themselves across geographic, conceptual, and generic boundaries, relocation writers are mapping out new possibilities for identity-making through new patterns of home-making within contemporary transnational lifestyles. ![]() Are their memoirs of ‘becoming Italian’ merely an exercise in social distinction that appropriates Italian ‘authenticity’ and packages it for global tastes? Or does dwelling in cultural difference over time lead to the development of an intercultural competence that is one aspect of an engaged form of cosmopolitanism? A close reading of the language, stylistics, and form of relocation narratives reveals a tension between colonial and cosmopolitan orientations as strategies for cultural representation. Focusing on Frances Mayes’s popular Tuscan texts, Annie Hawes’s Ligurian trilogy, and Tim Parks’s memoirs set in Verona, the study addresses how their accommodation over a period of long-term foreign residency is represented in multipart nonfiction accounts. This study examines the entwined processes of identity (re)formation and place attachment represented in recent relocation trilogies set in Italy, highlighting the tension between reality and illusion in the pursuit of la dolce vita in the adopted homeland. Lured by the dream of the ‘good life’ abroad, transnational writers detail their post-relocation experiences in autobiographical accounts that seek to educate and entertain global readers about what it means to accommodate to a new life in a new land. At the intersection of life writing and travel writing, relocation narratives form a distinct subgenre of contemporary travel memoirs concerned with the inter-subjective and intra-subjective experiences of travellers who become settlers in foreign locales. ![]()
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