Waymarking Italy’s Influence on the American Environmental Imagination While on Pilgrimage to Assisi

Undertaking a peripatetic pilgrimage that is equal parts a daily description of a 200-kilometre walk from the wounded mountain of La Verna to the tortured river in Assisi, and an examination of the debt owed to Italy in terms of ecocultural and environmental scholarship, this book provides an innovative addition to the nascent field of ecocritical narrative scholarship. Through a process that has been referred to as “deep-travel“ or “mind-walking,” the text fulsomely reviews how time spent in Italy influenced the writings of notable North American environmental historians, geographers, scientists, nature writers, landscape architects, and restoration theorists about the conception and manipulation of the natural world. This literary field study highlights how the phenomenological co-traversing of texts and trails can be a valued methodology for undertaking environmental criticism.