Uno sguardo alle guide cittadine dopo l’unità d’Italia.

If we consider that more than 30 texts documenting and illustrating its artistic heritage have been written since the unification of Italy alone, then the number of travel guides dedicated to the City of Ferrara truly is copious. From the middle of the nineteenth century on, thanks to the diffusion of fact keeping methods like document archiving, travel guides were enriched by scores of information. Guida del forestiero in Ferrara by Luigi Napoleone Cittadella (1873) is indeed an example of this. Throughout the twentieth century, the objective of any travel guide was to satisfy the curious traveler, who by the 1930s, could choose from a vast number of guides. The modern travel guide is full of images and landscape maps that detail any of the changes a city undergoes throughout the century. It’s worth mentioning the passionate tales told by Carlo Bassi with regards to Ferrara and its sites. In his guides, which were republished in subsequent editions, one finds images of evocative pathways which, as Bassi himself affirmed, “are fragments of a never-ending love story”.