A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the "Europe" of Nineteenth-Century Tourists
(Oxford UP, 1993). O S BSERVING THE frustration of a tourist's anticipations can help us grasp the basis of their fulfillment. In the early 1820s, a disappointed William Hazlitt found Rome to consist mainly of "a mass of tawdry, fulsome common-places," such as "an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets [filled] with the dingy, melancholy flat fronts of modem-built brick houses." What, he asked, had "a green-grocer's stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber's sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern livery lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome?" (279-80). Twenty years later, Frances Trollope arrived in Florence, dreaming of "enter[ing] bodily into the presence of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, . . .the great Cosmo . . . and Lorenzo," only to discover that Florence's "great historic features were merged in the ordinary appearances, common to all cities of the earth"; her "poetical reminiscences gave way before the confusion of butchers' stalls, grocers' shops, pedlars' booths, and the busy, and not very picturesque-looking population which was basking among them" (1: 94-95). A quarter century later, Henry James disliked Darmstadt for "reminding [the visitor] of the most sordid, the most squalid prose he knows-the cornergroceries and the region of the docks in his native metropolis" (Transatlantic 373). Passages like these are plentiful in the British and American travel literature of the nineteenth century. What were these travelers seeking, that such mundane presences as "butchers' stalls, grocers' shops, [and] pedlars' booths" should so discomfit them? I want to look beyond differences in specific ideals (antiquity for Hazlitt, Renaissance for Trollope) to consider the desideratum these passages clearly share, namely, alterity as such. This goal is apt to seem perfectly natural for travelers-who goes abroad to encounter what is near at hand? Unless the ordinary shops, eating