About the project

This website presents a selection of Dutch-language texts describing Italy, including the Vatican. This collection, available online and in open access, is based on a research project carried out at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) in the years 2017 and 2018. This project was led and carried out by the then director of the KNIR, Harald Hendrix, in collaboration with two trainees: Hendrik Visser, who collected the sources from before the year 1800, and Lex Kuil, who did the same for the documents from 1800 onwards.

Within the framework of this project a catalogue was compiled of the texts produced by authors from the Netherlands in which Italy is described, in Dutch or other languages. The catalogue includes travel descriptions, including reports and travel guides, and literature that features Italian locations. The corpus contains over a thousand texts from the early thirteenth century to the present, and includes published works (in book form and in periodicals) as well as manuscripts. From 2019 onwards the initiative has become part of a larger project from the University of Groningen: Digital Collections in the Spotlight.

Out of the collection of texts, three-hundred from after the 1800s are featured on this website. In the future this selection will be extended even further. In compiling the corpus, earlier published and non-published attempts from the past century to create a similar catalogue were used. 

The titles on this website link to the digitised versions of the three-hundred available texts in Delpher and DBNL.

The titles still under copyright are only visible within the institutions, behind the paywall, within the RUG campus and through the KNIR.