Emblema de modernidade: o relato de viagem de Vittorio Buccelli e o Rio de Janeiro como cartão de visita

Abstract

The publicist Vittorio Buccelli, as many others Italian professionals, follows his compatriots in the emigration outflow, trying to build commercial links between the emigrant departure land and his arrival land. In his record, published in Milan (1906), as in those from European travelers, we observe a process of a comparative lecture about the alterity; however, particularly in the case of this Italian, the other will be analyzed and narrated by the tentative to build commercial bridges between Brazil and Italy. In this sense, the narrative about the Brazilian experience means to deconstruct the fears and the negative representations of a disease, miasma and unordered space that walk pari passu with a terrestrial paradise image. Buccelli will become a great publicizer – in the European context – of the modernity’s image that the republicans are building in the country.