Ah, quando fia ch'io possa in Italia tornar? Ha ormai tre mesi, che in questi rei paese Già fatto schiavo, e dal mio ben lontano …

Alas, when might I return to my Italy?

For three months now I have been enslaved in this evil land, so distant from my home

Gioacchino Rossini, L'Italiana in Algeri

Nineteenth-century travel accounts contributed to the existing body of knowledge about the world at the time they were written, and today they serve as witness to the merging of expansionist progress with the scientific state. The primary function of these accounts was to circumscribe the world of rationality. Their authors were enlightened nomads whose duty was to incorporate new and astonishing facts as objects of knowledge into their writing, which created a mise en scène of mysterious plots; this process was in fact the first globalisation. Romanticism organised this narrative into a powerful textual montage on alterity, which combined scientific discourse, aesthetic response, and humanistic concern. Such a multifaceted set of characteristics posed serious challenges for the traveller-writer of that era, and Latin Americans had their own grand tour.