"Słodycz Italii, słodycz miasteczek Toskanii" - podróże włoskie Adama Zagajewskiego

Abstract

This article is an attempt to describe and interpret the journeys through Italy in the works of Adam Zagajewski. The object of my considerations is the figure of a traveler, whose condition is determinated by the fact of movement, being in motion, and Italian cities visited by Zagajewski, for some reasons important on the map of his autobiographical places, with reference to the category proposed by Małgorzata Czermińska. The aim of the research is not only to present Italy seen through the eyes of the author of Another Beauty, but also to compare his individual reflection on that country with myths and images perpetuated in culture. The perspective of tourist and flâneur interpenetrating in the poet’s Italian city-texts allow to look at the cities more broadly: they become a pretext for a deeper reflection on the essence of traveling, passing and perduring, the historicity of places and their peculiar melancholy. An important issue is also the category of strangeness, the feeling of being-not-in-place, that accompanies the cognizing subject, while strolling through the cities of Italy, which largely determines their literary representations in Zagajewski's body of work.