Write a composition about :The metaphor of travelling

Travel is one of the most present metaphors in the collective imaginary:ed it is the theme  more appreciated for a long time and used in many literary works.

Every literary epoch and each artist represents the travel theme according to his/her own ideology and his/her own historical period.

In every case we can individualize different types of travelling that assume different meanings.

The run can unwind in the reality, or in the internal world of the artist.

The category of the wayfarer has become wealthy of more and more varied characters.

To the manifold physiognomies of the traveller correspond many runs that can be undertaken. The travel can happen on the earth or in the sea, in the sky or it can be only an imaginary trip ,it might be a job commercial or a cognitive trip.

As it regards the first category of real trip we can see it as real , a physical move in the reality : in a real space for exemple :Three Men in a Boat which is a very funny story about three friends on holiday .

But the idea of travel that usually influences writers and poets is an  imaginary and unreal trip and it is so common under many writers because it can represent a metaphor of the human walk, as a run of growth that everyone undertook by himself and in different way.

We have to make a great distinction among imaginary trips in a real context or totally unreal travel.

In fact the trip can be also a fantastic narration which takes place in a real context: the most known example is that of the odyssey of Humerus ,in which the extraordinary story of the Ulissys's return involve monsters and divinity but it has as background the islands and the coasts of the Mediterranean sea.

Through the trip heroes as Ulisse affirm his/her own autonomy in opposition to every sketch, human or divine, that can hinder the liberty and the desire of knowledge.

A lot of times the trip happens in a nonexistent environment: an  example of an imaginary traveller, is Astolfo, the character of L'Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, who flies on the Moon to find the reason which one of his friend (Orlando)has lost on the Earth.

As we have already said the trip has great importance when it is not only physical but also psychological and cultural.

We depart from the antiquity in the Middle Ages, the religious interpretation of the trip is the most prevalent. New figures of travellers are born as the pilgrims, interested to the trip as penitence to be faced for discounting sins salesclerks, but also a story in which through the adventure of the trip the protagonist's knowledge of himself increase or for example to obtain  the attainment of the moral perfection as Dante in the Divine Comedy where the trip through purgatorial hell and heaven has a spiritual and allegorical meaning. Therefore it is a work of conversion, a long run through the discovery of the evil and the sins toward the redemption of the man.

Another author in whom the theme of travelling is important is Swift. The Gulliver's Travels is a novel, in which the satire against the man and the civilization reaches the perfection. The central point is the education of Gulliver through the varied experiences and the alteration of the forms and the measures, that allows to observe the world from a different point of view. The Gulliver's adventures during its trip through fantastic and unreal worlds have the purpose to make irony of some aspects of the society.

Another type of trip is that we find in the romantic authors as Chateaubriand in Renée, the trip is an autobiographic run through the adventures of the protagonist who undertakes a trip to America but also the internal aspect of the mind , the sense of the melancholy and loneliness is analyzed.

The interiority of the poet is represented by the protagonist and with its thoughts on the life and death and the pain.

In conclusion I think that the theme of the trip is extremely wide and it has been really successful because it can represent different aspects of human life and besides it is a literary expedient with which we can express our ideas.