Speaker
Description
This paper analyses Paolo Rumiz’s travel writing—particularly Appia (2016), A piedi (2012), and La leggenda dei monti naviganti (2007)—through an ecocritical perspective on the crisis of mobility, mass tourism, and the revival of slow travel. Drawing on Augé’s notion of non-places and Ingold’s wayfaring, the study interprets Rumiz’s journeys as acts of resistance against the commodification and acceleration of contemporary mobility. His walking narratives transform travel from a consumer experience into a practice of ecological and ethical re-appropriation of space. In Appia, the ancient Roman road becomes a line of memory that reconnects fragmented landscapes and forgotten communities; in A piedi, slowness and bodily fatigue recover the depth of perception lost in global tourism; in La leggenda dei monti naviganti, the focus on mountain regions exposes the invisibility of inland territories excluded from mass circuits. Rumiz’s prose thus constructs an “ecology of attention” (Bennett 2010), in which the act of walking re-enchants the Mediterranean and European landscape. By situating Rumiz within the ecocritical debate, this contribution interprets his narrative as a response to multiple crises—environmental, perceptual, and cultural—showing how slow travel can become a form of care and reparation for both humans and places.
| Keywords | crisis of mobility, Rumiz, ecocritical travel writing, ethics of slowness, re-appropriation of space |
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| ellen.patat@istanbul.edu.tr |