A Pilgrim without Mecca, in Rome. Sara Gallardo and her Selection of the Roman Chronicles

Abstract

Among the texts considered as journalistic work of the writer Sara Gallardo (Buenos Aires, 1931-1988), we found the chronicles written for the Argentine newspaper La Nación, during her stay in Rome, Italy (1982-1988). For these pages, I focus on a selection of these Roman chronicles chosen by the writer herself for a volume of the collection Escritores Argentinos de Hoy by the Editorial Celtia, titled Páginas de Sara Gallardo seleccionadas por la autora (1987), with the aim of showing her writing and testimonial value in relation to the construction of an identity of her own, though also a collective one, taking into account the cultural intersections between Argentina and Italy, which is the main objective of the project we present here. The theoretical frame of this analysis is: studies on the Contemporary Urban Chronicle, Writings of the Self, Imagology and Travel Narratives, as well as the study of irony and its textual mechanisms, as long as they can assist us tounderstand the explicit and the implicit in these texts.