Dr. Joe Luzzi

For centuries, especially during the Enlightenment and the Romantic Age, European travelers from England, France, and many other nations would travel to Italy for extensive periods to explore the riches of Italian art and culture. In this seminar, Joseph Luzzi, the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, will explore this phenomenon of the “Grand Tour,” with an eye to explaining how and why so many foreigners looked to Italy as what the German author Goethe called “the world’s university.” We will pay particular attention to those works of Renaissance and ancient art and architecture that exerted such a strong pull on the foreign imagination.