Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria: for a literature of memory and a contemporary archeology in the narrative vision of Francesco Bevilacqua.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the famous work Old Calabria written by Norman Douglas and published in 1915, in order to examine the influence of Calabrian culture of the 20th century on English literature. The stimulus for this investigation comes mainly from articles on British and Italian travel literature which I read before writing this thesis to have a broader view of this topic. The literature review describes in detail theoretical issues with regard to the motivations of British writers to reach southern Italy, particularly Norman Douglas, according to whom he would find in the fascinating Calabria a source of inspiration and influence for his literary productions. The present investigation also considers the experience of the contemporary Italian writer and hiker Francesco Bevilacqua who travelled throughout Calabria, even though he chose different itineraries in comparison with Norman Douglas, in order to search for the same beauty narrated in Old Calabria, and to trace a sort of balance between “old” and “new” after all these years. The data gathering processes consist mainly of qualitative semi-structured interviews with two participants (the above-mentioned Italian writer and the Italian professor and writer Emanuele Lelli), interview transcripts and content analysis technique which I used to examine and interpret data collected. Findings indicate that Calabria has directly entered into post-modernity, namely, into the Telematics and Information Technology era that developed between the middle and the end of the 20th century, bypassing industrialization and marked urbanism. As a result, recent data, such as the lower population density in addition to the lack of major industries and metropolises, as well as the population that still lives in rural and mountainous contexts, would characterize this marked “diversity” from the rest of Europe. This analysis concludes that, although many years have passed since Douglas’ first visit to Calabria, Francesco Bevilacqua’s research seems to confirm a considerable permanence of the archaic and mythical influence. Hence, many people, particularly writers and artists from northern Europe, especially from England, seem to show a keen interest in southern culture and therefore reach Calabria for tourism, and in many cases, to change their “homeland” as well.