Sulle tracce di Marco Polo. Gli scrittori di viaggio e la rappresentazione dell’Oriente

Following in the footsteps of a traveller from the past is also a way to rethink the meaning and transformations of the tradition of travel writing. For many writers, the figure of Marco Polo has been the meta-literary device for reflecting on the repertoire of strategies for representing the East. This essay traces some of the stages in the history of Marco Polo’s role in contemporary travel writing, with its aesthetics of exoticism, political tourism, postmodern rewritings and paths of cultural mediation. From this perspective, the East has been intended as a figure of displacement, the mental space of an alternative onto which to project the impulses of the social unconscious.