Between 1899 and 1911 Anna Petrovna Ostroumova-Lebedeva travelled to Italy three times. Besides a narrative dimension, i.e. the immediate transposition of her travel impressions into diaries and letters to her family and a successive further elaboration of these documents in the context of an autobiographic exercise, a visual dimension emerges, reflecting the itinerary throughout the Italian peninsula via a pictorial representation. These two forms of story-telling, verbal and visual, share a common feature, i.e. the activation of memory. The painting and the autobiographic story represent the tangible result of memory mechanisms activated by the painter to create the image of Italy, resorting to cultural categories, such as spiritual homeland, aesthetic space, a space of beauty and harmony, and reducing everyday experiences to mere traces, details deprived of any semantic value. More broadly, these mechanisms reflects the usual approach to Italy adopted by Russian travelers.
