Reports from Gina Lombroso-Ferrero's trip to Brazil (1908): Brazil under new interpretative parameters

• Grant number: 18/16526-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2018
• End date: September 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Francisco Claudio Alves Marques
• Grantee: Kariany Kelly Ortiz Cardoso
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Among the images framed and disseminated by the travel literature about the New World, the one that associated the new sighted lands to the Paradise on Earth stood out, helping to feed an imaginary, in Europe, full of expectations regarding the unusual things described by the European travelers. In that scenario are presented two opuscule attributed to Américo Vespúcio describing the new land conquered between the heavenly and the wonderful. Although such imaginary began to be shaped between 1400-1500, it was still very present in the European continent when the first waves of Italian immigrants embarked on the adventure of "fare l'America". Our proposal here is, through the reading of the work Nell'America Meridionale, written by the Italian doctor Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, who visited Brazil in 1908 due to the massive Italian presence, to investigate to what extent this imaginary about our country is confirmed or deconstructed in her work, also taking into consideration that, whereas she is a doctor, she casts a "clinical" look at the Brazilian human landscape.