The Royal Society and the Discovery of the Two Sicilies

Manuela D’Amore is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Catania in Italy. The author of literary translations and essays on Early Modern Literature and the Victorian Age, she has also written on British eighteenth-century travelers to Italy, America and the Middle East. Her Essays in Defence of the Female Sex: Custom, Education and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England, co-written with Michèle Lardy (Sorbonne I), appeared in 2012.

1. Introduction.- I. Learned Travel before the Grand Tour: The Royal Society 1665-1700.- 2. The Fellows' Letters from Distant Countries: New Science, the "Other" and Imperialism.- 3. News from the Mainland: Mapping Physical and Intellectual Spaces before the Grand Tour.- 4. On the Ancients and the Power of Nature: The Special Case of Italy.- II. The Grand Tour of South Italy: The Discovery of the Two Sicilies 1700-1800.- 5. Southern Paths for Learned Travelers: The Discovery of Herculaneum and of the Neoclassical Mediterranean.- 6. Images of "Sublime" Sicily.- 7. From Letters to Memoirs and Travel Accounts: The Fellows as "Cultural Mediators".