Hester Piozzi's Observations and Reflections: Italy in the Feminine

The article analyses the ways in which women began to write about travel in the course of the eighteenth-century and in order to do so had to appropriate literary traditions which had been developed by male writers. This brought to an inevitable manipulation of the discourses of travel circulating at the time, and opened the way to potential subversions of the ideologies about women's place in society. The way in which the image of Italy was "translated" in order to serve a specific purpose is the subject of the article.