Melissa Calaresu

From the Street to Stereotype: Urban Space, Travel and the Picturesque in Late Eighteenth-Century Naples

Abstract The growing historiography on the construction of the stereotype of the South in the history of modern Italy has exposed its persistence in the character of the lazzaroni of Naples and its elaboration in Grand Tour accounts of Naples in the late eighteenth century. This article demonstrates that, despite this ethnographic interest in the popular culture of the streets of the city, travellers were unable to escape existing stereotypes of the Neapolitan in their descriptions and, in fact, strengthened them by creating an urban stereotype of the picturesque which survives into the modern period.