In the current debate on travel writing in the twentieth century, rather than referring to a literary genre, there is a tendency to identify various textual types and, in particular, the geography of places through the perspective of special correspondents in the East and the West.

Travel Literature owes much to journalism and the reports of those “writers for hire” who, like Corrado Alvaro or Enrico Emanuelli, felt “lent” from artistic prose to the third page and the editorial.

The journey to Greece stands out from others due to its unique identity, which makes it a true topos of a classic, spiritual, and cultural itinerary that blends Hellenism and Neoclassicism. Starting from D’Annunzio, who constructs his own mental and mythical Greece, which has little to do with the real Greece described during the cruise undertaken with Scarfoglio and George Hèrelle, to the Arcadia of Emilio Cecchi, where Florentine culture is very strong along with the topos of the motherland and the city of origin, together with the topos of ineffability present in the image of the Parthenon “simple as a glass of water, sublime as a Pater Noster.”

Myth and history merge in the Italian travelers to Greece of the twentieth century, described by Robert Byron as the cradle of European civilization through lyrical images that can be found in Riccardo Bacchelli's Journey to Greece, who is ecstatic in front of the ancient ruins of the land of Socrates and Pausanias and the numerous overlaps between Greek civilization and Roman history.

Comisso's perspective is absolutely original, as an authentic traveler in search of strong sensations found in Approdo in Grecia, which can be considered the autobiography of a “viator felix,” a wandering traveler and nomad always in search of the genius loci or an ubi consistam that he now finds in the small Nauplia and now in the splendid city of Olympia.

In the delightful little book Dall’Ellade al Bisanzio by Alberto Arbasino, written during the 1960 Olympics, the borders extend to Turkey, and there is a tendency to demystify the sacredness of the Greek land and to exalt its philosophy from Parmenides to Plato, from Pythagoras to Aristotle through the playful narrative of a snobbish and refined intellectual.