Travel Writing Preliminary Post Two: Cliches

Last year, I discussed the idea of quaintness...and the necessity to talk about food (I think).

This year, I want to talk about something I discovered while reading for my Translation class: The necessity to talk about difference.
Yes, Italy is different from America. Yes, the food is different, the architecture is different. The SKY is different (sometimes), but does that really mean we have to talk about it all the time?
I find it tiring to read about how different places are from each other. What makes one the original? What makes one the normal that everything else is based on?
I think every place is a translation of the other. A shifting culture that allows the very essence of the world to exist. The very reason that traveling is so much fun...to experience something new, something translated into a relevant norm. Not anything different, necessarily...just translated.

The other thing I discovered as a sort of cliche was the way they're always depicted as angry or lovers-ey. I was watching a commercial for Gelato by Haagen-Dazs that first depicted two Italian people (obviously a couple) fighting INTENSELY until the girl (it's always the girl, isn't it?) discovers the Gelato sticking out of the brown bag and they start to feed each other and tell each other they love the other and all that...until she asks him if he's going to apologize...and then they start fighting again. If that's the way Italians are painted, we saw the wrong ones last year. That's all I'm going to say. But that's not relevant to writing about travel in Italy at all...

If we are being specific to travel writing cliches, I think that everyone finds that they have to write about the coast or being at Pompeii...but I'm finding more and more that I want to discover the little places, the small towns hidden in the foothills or in between major train stops, like Arezzo, where we got lost last year. I'm excited to be able to "get lost" more, because THAT'S the true Italy, if you will...The Italy that the guidebooks don't tell you about...The Italy that is the difference between a traveler and a tourist.