A look from outside: foreign photographers in Palermo between the 19th and 20th centuries

At the beginning of the 19th century, the representation of Italy was mostly due to the literary and artistic narrative of foreign travellers. The resulting image influenced the vision Italians had of their own country and carried weight with the awareness of their national identity. Sicily stood outside the traditional itinerary of the Grand Tour for a long time and only became an essential stop after the publication of Goethe and Vivant Denon’s travel journals in the 1780s. This literature led to the codification of a series of stereotypes linked to neoclassical culture and to the first development of Romanticism. With the introduction of photography in mid-19th century, the role of nature’s copyist traditionally attributed to engraving and painting is attributed to the new media. It is not surprising to see how much the long tradition of landscape painting affected the language of photography with the choice of subjects, vantage points and framing of the city. At the same time, Palermo was the scene of revolutionary events and major changes in the urban layout: while those events reawaken the interest about Sicily, luring visitors and photographers from other European countries, the way of representing the city slowly switch from the landscape painting tradition, typical of the Grand Tour period, to a postcard repertoire adapted to the needs of mass tourism. Through photography, similarly to what happened with art and literature, the external gaze strongly influenced the way Palermo was picturing itself. Going back over those images enables to understand how selection of subjects, cutting and framing evolved through the eye of foreign photographers travelling in the city between 19th and 20th centuries.