Podróż włoska, czyli zobaczyć Neapol i umrzeć
Italian Trip. See Naples and Die

Summary/Abstract: The article entitled Italian Trip. See Naples and Die concerns gay and homosexual voyages to the Apennine peninsula. The author tries to construct a typology of these trips using Georg Simmel’s analysis of ruins presented by the German philosopher in his essay entitled The Ruin. The ruins are metaphor of such organized trips in the modern and postmodern era as well. On the one hand their monumental scale and age may be an alleged reason for a trip (like for Winckelmann were) and their antiquity and Greco-Roman affiliation are the most important point of reference for all of the travelers mentioned in the text (Winckelmann, Thomas Mann and Wilhelm von Gloeden for instance). On the other hand, the sorry state of the ruins is their symbolic power connected with such categories as: decomposition, breakdown, impermanence, and death. This ambiguity is characteristic not only for the ruins but for the trips as well. Hence, death and passing are the second face of the trips. In other words, the Italian trips are always made in the face of death. So, the second part of the text describes two American trips that consciously repeat that ambivalence and tension between Eros and Thanatos. The first one is Nan Goldin’s travel to Italy, the second one – Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s trip to Paris. By the analysis of photographs made by the artists, the author reveals modernist and Simmelian aspects of AIDS.

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