Symons on Italy and the Metamorphoses of Aesthetic Travel Writing

Italy was the main subject of Arthur Symons’s travel writing. The country was the focus of a series of sketches on cities, places, and culture that not only set forth the features of the author’s subsequent works in the genre, still the fruit of symbolist, aesthetic and decadent poetics, but also offered clues to the literary influences and borrowings in his whole oeuvre. In order to show Symons’s indebtedness to the poetics of the fin de siècle, this essay first explores how Symons’s writings on Italy interact with a number of previous works, particularly by John Addington Symonds and Vernon Lee, on both of whom Symons modelled his impressionistic techniques of representation of places. The connection with Lee appears especially relevant, since Symons has traditionally been viewed in relation to an exclusively male canon, while on the contrary a close reading of his travel writing as compared to Lee’s reveals unexplored networks of influence. The analysis pays special attention to Symons’s re-elaboration of such a recurring Leeian concept as the “genius loci” through time. This and other elements Symons adapted from Lee, Symonds, and others in his earlier travel pieces paved the way to his later London. A Book of Aspects (1909), an experimental volume much more oriented towards modernity. Accentuating the impressionistic tendencies of Symons’s previous essays, London is made up of loosely related paragraphs that tell of solipsistic wanderings in the metropolis and of the mental associations they elicit. Both the disconnected narrative structure and the focus on cityscapes appear to anticipate metropolitan scenes in avant-garde literature, ultimately witnessing to the fact that Symons’s travel writings of impressionistic inspiration represented a vital connection between fin-de-siècle culture and Edwardian and Modernist poetics.