Ricerc@Sapienza

The articles focuses on the tour of French travellers into "Paludi Pontine" between 19th and 20th century and it reconstruct . During the spring period or in autumn French travellers crossed via Appia from Rome to Terracina and they described the marshs as a desert, a unhealty place and a infested place with brigands. The flavour as desert mirrored opposite image to that of urban space, representative of "civilisation europeénne". Conceptual opposition between desert and urban space highlighted the desert as metaphor of human condition.