Paesaggi letterari, paesaggi fiscali. Le sponde del Lario nei catasti e nei resoconti di viaggio (secoli XVIII-XIX)

Literary landscapes, fiscal landscapes. The shores of the Lario in cadastres and travel reports (XVIII-XIX Centuries). Travel literature constitutes a well-known tool for the reconstruction of historical landscapes. The article, focused on the Larian area, analyses comparatively the landscape emerging from this narrative and subjective source and that of the contemporary eighteenth-nineteenth-century cadastral sources (Milanese Cadastre and Lombard-Venetian Cadastre), to which a greater objectivity is ascribed. The odeporic production available for this area has contributed to build a long-lasting myth of it. But how far do travellers’ narratives differ diverged from the gaze of the surveyors in charge of drawing up a cadastre? How far from both were the territory described by local communities, in the cadastre establishment process? Some different gazes and purposes emerge, giving shape to different images of the same landscape, each of which only partly reflects the historical reality that we attempt, centuries later, to recompose.