Eat, Pray, Buy a House: Utopian Visions of Italy in the New Millennium
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the peculiar combination of literary memoir, utopian dream and material culture that sprung from a number of books written about Italy (living in Italy, buying a home in Italy, moving back to Italy) in the new millennium. The famous <i>Under the Tuscan Sun</i>, published in 1996, constitutes one of the earliest and most famous examples of this new genre. According to the Tuscan Sun book, it is not longer enough to travel somewhere, but the traveler needs to commune with the land by owning a piece of it. While relatively new, this particular sub-genre, defined by a critic “brick and mortar travel memoir,” has yielded insightful analyses about travels and the encounters with the other in the 21st Century. Memoirs about living, as foreigners, in contemporary Italy are weaved with the utopian dream of finding something in Italy something real: a real sense of community, real food, real feelings, plus a landscape where human interventions have been gentle and capable of creating real beauty. The article examines a number of memoirs written in recent years about Italy. This analysis is conducted primarily from the point of view of utopian studies, but it also explores issues of authenticity and materiality, thereby offering an analysis of the way Italy is nowadays perceived, imagined and idealized in contemporary travel literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".