Everybody’s Orient. Fragments of Images from Illustrated Travel Journals (Nineteenth-century Milan)

The article analyses the visions of the East which appear in some ‘popular’ illustrated journals in Milan during the second half of the 19th century, published by Emilio Treves and Edoardo Sonzogno. The accounts by male and female intellectuals, historians, diplomats, explorers, geographers and scientists, allow us to reconstruct an important dimension in the circulation of knowledge to what was a fairly wide reading public. These accounts reflect the political and cultural climate, characterised by the development of the geographical societies, cultural colonialism and so on. Lastly, they offer a window onto the cultural politics of these initiatives which, by harking back to the experience of the French illustrated journals,exploited developments in print technology to enrich the stories with compelling images.