Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l'Italia

A Sentimental journey through France and Italy is the amusing tale of a somewhat bumbling traveller’s adventures of Yorick who is a country priest that travels from the English mainland to France and Italy. On these adventures Yorick does note the customs of the locals in an amusing way. The narration is humoristic but, at the same time, quiet and sentimental. Yorick, jester to the court of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, is a sentimental traveller placidly observing natural and anthropical landscapes. In its personal journey through places he captures delicate shades of human being but also violently emotional sceneries. Beauty and sublime, pleasure and pain make the text particularly attractive for Foscolo. The taste for evasion and the existential pathos make Yorick’s journey the model for the new Italian odeporic literature. Foscolo’s translation of Sterne’s book inaugurates a novel literary and existential genre.