The Discovery of the Apennine Mountains: Reproduced Landscapes and Aesthetic Models by Edward Lear

The essay aims to draw attention to the substantial and still relevant contribution of Edward Lear (1812–1888) in defining the values and predominant characteristics of experiential and immersive travel practiced in the “minor mountains” of the Apennines, from which derives the not insignificant importance of the dissemination of personal exploratory experiences through travel literature and graphic-pictorial representation. The contribution highlights the anthropological as well as geographical features of his precise accounts of Italy’s “hundred cities,” the symbiotic relationship between the wandering scholar and the environment explored, between the identification of the value units of the traversed contexts and the textual forms employed to communicate the experience, between the textual paradigm and the visual conception. Experiences are layered into a repertoire of written and drawn images, which are the essence of visual culture and the articulated common imaginary attributed to the places and spatial reality of his time. For Western culture, slow walking tourism and landscape-experiential tourism rediscovers an approach of direct reading of the “high lands”, intertwining the gazes of both stationary and temporary protagonists in a new ecology of vision, which can contribute to shaping the identifying characteristics of the mountain in its evolving ecosystem. The narrative tends to become plural and stratified, the construction of the prevailing images can take place through contemporary languages and communication channels; then, the story is spread through expressive forms and original devices that implement the canonical expressive methods. It will be simpler to spread preliminary, but not superficial, knowledge of places by providing information or simply conveying lived sensations, even just through individual frames of unique moments in space and time.