Paths of the Sublime: Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel

Bearing in mind the central place of literary, academic, and religious tourism in Cultural Studies and in Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel (2002), the paper seeks: 1) to identify some remarkable travels of famous writers – the British Wordsworth; the French Karl-Joris Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire; 2) to show that in the analysis of such authors’ itineraries (from Europe to the East), there is a search for cultural roots, a mapping of spaces and people, and a deconstruction of labels often related to the Other; 3) to point out that the tourist is also a storyteller, a protagonist, and a creator of fictional worlds; 4) to bring together literary tourism and artistic tourism, through the identification of allusions to other cultural events (painting, music, and architecture); 5) to characterize tourism as a literary and aesthetic experience of the Sublime.