"Il Piacer Ch'avea Di Gire / Cercando Il Mondo": Travel and Geography in Orlando Furioso

Among the many angles that literary critics have used to approach Orlando Furioso, the topic of the representation of space has been one of the most prolific in recent decades. In Ariosto, space and the unity of place are, in effect, exploded. All of the poem's characters run away and chase each other, as if driven by a powerfully centrifugal force, and the poem's settings are stretched by those different travels. Ariosto takes control over this randomness with his careful use of authentic document, including contemporary travel reports, atlases, and maps. In doing so, Ariosto embodies and at the same time models and realizes one of the main themes of humanism, namely, the centrality of research and a scientific spirit still capable of feeding on imagination. The journeys in the Furioso bring imagination back into the ranks of rationality, and they tint rationality with the colors of dreams. The journey is where fantasy and truth meet. This paper focuses on a specific aspect connected to the study of Furioso geography: the various forms of journeys and movements. Journeying, in fact, is the essence of Ariosto's poem, to the point that the theme of the hero's quest can be considered the symbolic correlative of knowledge for the Renaissance human.