Unromantic Praz: Anti-Sterotyped Portraits of Cities and Places

Along with his dense activity of writer, traveller and literary critic, Praz has devoted great attention to the description of towns, especially those linked to the touristic flow and therefore associated with some fixed images. In these cases, guidebooks use to provide the starting point, by giving the reader both a suite of stereotypes and the concept –that is the reasons why we must visit that city-. Spain in particular offered him a long series of cliché, based on a romantic approach and attached to some icons such as corridas, gipsy dance, paella... This is why the text “Unromantic Spain” represents, in my opinion, the clearest analysis about a wrong way to deal with a country the visitor doesn’t know yet, According to Praz, knowledge must be based on personal experience and, far from a series of commonplaces, it could be at most fueled by the reading of some selected texts taken from the local intellectual milieu. In this snobbish vision, Praz reveals his nostalgia for the protagonists of the grand tour, together with his contempt for the age of mass tourism.