Tourist / traveller dichotomy in Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s De Madrid a Nápoles (1861)

Abstract

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the author of the book entitled From Madrid to Naples (1861), appears in its pages as a critical observer of the emerging phenomenon of organized tourism, around which he makes numerous remarks in his work. Even new editorial tools, such as tourist guides that were increasingly used by travelers in the mid-nineteenth century, are considered by Alarcón in a negative way. From a formal point of view, Alarcón’s book is a hybridisation of genres that summons innovative journalistic writing skills, literary patterns already experienced in classical travel writing (concerned mainly with diary and epistolary genres) and a great deal of sketches taken d’après nature by the traveler and kept in his notebook.