Terra Cognita. Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy

In Terra Cognita, poet and essayist Chad Davidson investigates the seemingly never-ending fascination that travelers have with Italy. Across nine essays, he probes the spaces that emerge between the travel we intended to take and what we ended up with, as well as how we base our lived experience on all the simulations and imitations around us. A place as overexposed as Italy can become a kind of palimpsest, an amalgam, a projection, ultimately, of what we already had in mind. For nearly thirty years now-more than half his life-Davidson has shuttled back and forth to Italy. Terra Cognita finds literary predecessors such as Dante and Italo Calvino crowding in as much as any travel-show host, Hollywood film star, or hopelessly romantic portrayal of Florence might. Though each essay departs from a particular location in Italy and remains rooted in the author’s own history there, they ultimately become less about that place and more about the placeless-ness any such travel can engender. Whether visiting places overblown (Rome, Venice), lesser known (Spoleto, Postignano), or even island outposts (Sardegna, Pantelleria), Terra Cognita meditates on all the demands we place on travel writ large: to fix us, to right us, to console us and dampen our griefs, to entertain and edify us, to feed us what we want. No country or travel to it could meet all those demands. Davidson voices the failures and attractions of such an enterprise, how-even after flying across an ocean and landing in a foreign country-we are still hopelessly and fully ourselves.

Chad Davidson is the author of the essay collection Terra Cognita: Dispatches from an Over-Traveled Italy and four volumes of poetry, most recently Unearth. He lives in Carrollton, Georgia.