Rhetoric between the Useful and the Pleasant in Guidebooks to Italian Cities in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

This article examines the formation and development of the vernacular city guide between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, focusing on its rhetorical status in light of the traditional opposition between the useful and the pleasant. Starting from Leandro Alberti’s Descrittione di tutta Italia, the article shows how this new editorial genre emerged at the intersection of periegesis, chorography, topography, historiography, laus urbis, and practices connected with proto-touristic mobility. The analysis highlights the gradual shift of emphasis from an encomiastic and literary dimension toward a more practical and informative function, aimed at an increasingly broad readership of readers, travellers, and foreigners. The case of Neapolitan guidebooks makes it possible to observe a terminological and functional transformation, from 'descrittione' to guide, while comparison with Florence and Venice reveals the non-linear nature of this process and the persistence of different local solutions. What emerges is a hybrid genre, strongly shaped by the publishing market and by its intended users, in which the usefulness of information coexists with residues and reworkings of the rhetorical-literary tradition of urban praise.