Impressions of Journey in Calabria Ulteriore from the Diary of Dominique Vivant Denon

Abstract

The urban and territorial representation of the Kingdom of Naples mediated by the Voyage Pittoresque, of the expedition organized by Jean Claude Richard, Abbot de Saint-Non and coordinated by Dominique Vivant Denon assumes – for Calabria – a new value transforming itself, after the earthquake of 1783, into the last documentary testimony of a practically disappeared world, as evidenced by the review of the work written by Gabriel Brizard on the Mercure de France in February 1787.
The sentimental journey of Denon, in his bewitching original version published in 1785-86, describes the journey also through the description of the emotions experienced in the different places visited.
Calabria, and above all, the Ulteriore (Lower part) appears a wild Arcadia where «il n'y a que le temps qui dure».
In this sense, the descriptions of Denon are nothing more than the literary transposition of an aesthetic of nature that is expressed in the corpus of drawings of the visited places and which subverts the definition of "beauty" according to the traditional criteria.
In the intrinsic relationship between town centres and the natural landscape of southern Calabria narrated by Denon, the three villages of Roccella, Gerace and Scilla are distinguished by their impact on a territorial scale, crystallized in the views of Claude-Louis Châtelet and Louis-Jean Desprez, that will become true figurative topoi.