Despite the increasing interest in women’s travelogues, no study has so far focused on those written by Italian women about the Northern European area. This dissertation aims at filling up this gap with a comparative analysis of six reports, written by six different women who travelled the Nordic Countries between the end of the XIX and the first decades of the XX century. Besides retrieving these forgotten travelogues, this study concentrates on each author's gaze on the itinerary, expressed in a narrative that enables the readers to share both the authors’ emotional status and their frame of mind.

The dissertation situates the target authors both in their historical context, drawing the Italian background of the time, and in the frame of women’s traveling, relating the authors to the previous foreign women travellers in this same area.

An accurate synthesis of each travelogue allows to proceed to a comparative study among these travel books, based on their most relevant characteristics: the chosen itinerary, the encounters, the cultural impact of the target countries on each woman writer.

As the itineraries take place along the usual touristic routes of the time, the research is rather concerned on the writers’ emotional experience, first of all towards the places they visit and the atypical natural landscapes they encounter along the journey.

Thereafter the study analyses the authors’ thorough curiosity and deep interest towards the Other, either represented by casual encounters along the route, or seen as a category, as in the case of the Laplanders. A specific focus is devoted to Nordic women, whose social position and role, especially in the urban areas, arise the writers’ attention.

The last part of the corpus examines the attitude towards culture, either focused on everyday life or concerning the different aspects of Nordic folklore; cultural institutions are also described, as well as some historical, economical, and political features that the authors consider as relevant features for their reports. Eventually, a special attention is deserved to the travellers’ attitude towards their homeland, emotionally depicted and compared to the target Countries, with a nostalgia mixed to a sense of belonging and a feeling of cultural primacy.

The study places these forgotten travelogues into a more general hodoeporic perspective, with particular attention to Italian women’s writings, opening at the same time the path to a deeper analysis of each report and its author.