Religious Images of the Netherlands in Italy: An Analysis of Press Articles and Novel Translations

This paper seeks to investigate the image of the Netherlands in Italy, a topic which has so far received scant attention in Dutch Studies. Drawing on the theoretical framework of imagology – which analyses how clichés about a country or a population appear in different communication media – this study will lie its focus on the contrast between the stereotypes on the Netherlands spread by the Italian press and the image of the Dutch that emerges from the translation of Dutch novels into Italian. An online search into the archives of the two most sold Italian newspapers2 from 1990 to 2017 and the database of Dutch novels translated into Italian in the same time span revealed that the Netherlands is portrayed in two different ways, especially when it comes to religion-related debates. The results seem to suggest that different media tend to create different images of the same country