Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: that turned into a horrendous saga of frostbite and starvation. He visited London three times, and even contributed articles to English-language journals on the cultural life of Paris. Stendhal liked to pepper his French with anglicisms, and was one of the first writers to popularise the use of the word ‘tourist ’ in French. It was on one of his visits to Italy in 1817 that Stendhal described an experience that brought the literary swoon into tourism. Visiting the Basilica of Santa Croce, he found a monk to let him into the chapel where he could sit on a genuflecting stool, tilt his head back and take in the prospect of Volterrano’s fresco of the Sibyls without interruption. The pleasure was keen. ‘I was already in a kind of ecstasy, ’ he writes, ‘by the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in contemplating sublime beauty, I saw it close-up — I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that point of emotion where the heavenly sensations of the fine arts meet passionate feeling. As I emerged from Santa Croce, I had palpitations (what they call an attack of the nerves in Berlin); the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling. ’ It was something he had observed about himself: ‘when a thought takes too strong a hold of me, ’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘I fall down.’1 There were to be many cases resembling S t e n d h a l ’ s experience in the
Author: Iain Bamforth
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2063540475