Una viaggiatrice serba nell'Italia dell'Ottocento: Jelisaveta Trifković

A Serbian traveler in nineteenth-century Italy: Jelisaveta Trifkovic Abstract The topic of this contribution is an analysis of Jelisaveta Trifkovic’s handwritten journal of her trip to Italy in 1874. Unlike the emancipated and often eccentric British, French or American women travelers visiting Italy on their Grand Tours during the same years to satisfy their intellectual curiosity, the Serbian woman stuck to her role as a wife and, when traveling, usually accompanied her husband. In fact, the reconstruction of the playwright Kosta Trifkovic’s Italian travels is made possible not only by his letters, but only by his wife’s journal, a reliable and authentic source on his stops at Trieste, Venice and Naples. Little is known about Mrs. Trifkovic, a marginal figure in Serbian literature and culture. It is for this very reason that her journal is such a precious source, with its simple, clear style and its occasional solecisms and dialectics. Impressions, observations and judgment are always genuine and never conditioned by Kosta’s personality or by literary clichés.