Sulla lingua dei viaggiatori (sec. xv-xvi) : la natura e il paesaggio

This article is a study of a selected group of travel literature texts, written between the second half of the fifteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century (from Alvise da Mosto, 1465, to Francesco Carletti, 1606). The texts were written by travellers to the West and to the Orient of the world. The study examines linguistic structures by which the travellers aim to represent the strangeness and the otherness of foreign landscapes and natural phenomena of America and the Middle and Extreme East. There are two fundamental typologies of figures : figures of enhancement, by which the author aims to amplify represented object, to express both the emotion of the discovery and its novelty ; figures of multiplicity and variety, by which he gives a linguistic equivalent of the great wealth of landscapes, animals and flora of the visited countries.