Reisen in das befremdliche Pompeji. Antiklassizistische Antikenwahrnehmung deutscher Italienreisender 1750 –1870 (review)

Fitzon's volume marks a very important contribution to the study of travel literature in general as well as to the understanding of a wide range—in historical, thematic and generic terms—of responses to the sites at Pompeii and Herculaneum. There has, of course, been a great deal written about the German literature focussing on Italian travel, although that focus has generally been rather narrow, with Rome the main geographical location under discussion and Goethe the key personality. On this basis, and as a reflection of the focus of the primary texts, much of the critical writing has concerned itself with a relatively narrow selection of historical sites as well as a relatively homogenous set of assumptions about the history, culture, and art of classical—and, to a far lesser extent, modern—Italy. We cannot, for example, miss the voice of Winckelmann in many of the travelogues produced after approximately 1760; Winckelmann clearly armed several generations of writers with very fixed criteria for the assessment of their Italian experiences. Fitzon, for his part, encourages us to look further south, to look at more diverse and problematic materials, and also to take a wider chronological perspective; his selection of primary materials offers very interesting evidence of what happens when the traveller is removed from his comfort zone.

The opening chapter deals with the complex relationship between the apparent perception of a given place and the literary recording of that experience. Particularly illuminating is the treatment of the generic, structural, and stylistic factors that affect the ostensibly naïve discussion of travel experience. We observe, on the basis of multiple examples, the delicate negotiation of the limits of authenticity and the power of literary convention. Furthermore we are shown the web of intertextuality which may characterise even relatively 'simple' travel reports. Fitzon moves on to discuss the changing nature of the tourism which informs the given texts, the broader historical shift in expectation and focus. These shifts are further complicated by the changing nature of the discoveries made at the key sites or else the changing understanding of them. Irritation is a key notion in his analysis; irritatingly, travellers found that the objects they encountered in Pompeii or Herculaneum did not conform to their expectations. Hence they were forced to expand their criteria or, failing that, to remain at a loss. Fitzon performs an important service in making readers aware of the changing specifics of travel to these developing sites through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We are given brief but pertinent accounts of the excavations and of the manner of exhibition of the articles discovered. We are also taken systematically through the materials which the travellers found difficult, particularly if armed with the expectations of neoclassical aesthetics. We are shown at length how the architecture unearthed failed to live up to prevailing expectations of ordered grandeur, how the nature and extent of the ornamentation exploded prevailing aesthetic categories. Furthermore we see how travellers struggled to deal with the apparent imperfection of the painting and the almost routine artistic depiction of 'obscene' objects. There appears to be little evidence at any stage of a gently considered response to Pompeii and Herculaneum. To some writers they are simply a disappointment and fail to live up to established expectations; to others they are provincial and decadent; still others find them dark and mysterious; the smug travellers find that Pompeii and Herculaneum remind us of just how far we have come! In this connection Fitzon, of course, confirms the fact that travel writing often tells us as much about the traveller and his background as it does about the places visited.

There are two other aspects of this volume which should be mentioned. Firstly, Fitzon goes beyond conventional travel literature to deal with the emergence of Pompeii as a motif in 'high' literature. Furthermore, he provides us with an extensive bibliography (with commentary) of...