Le tappe toscane del Buffalo Bill’s Wild West e la «voglia d’America» degli italiani, 1890-1906

In fin-de-siècle Italy, because of journalists, intellectuals, and wealthy travelers, a cluster of ideas began to form regarding the United States as land of modernity, extravagance, and exuberance. This corpus of images and stereotypes fueled a growing interest in America, a sort of “proto-Americanization”, and served to interpret everything originating from it. When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West toured the Peninsula in 1890 and 1906, Italians approached the show and its various aspects – advertising, internal organization, program acts – through the same conceptual framework. Tuscany, visited during both tours, and the impressions of its inhabitants about the show provide an excellent case study to investigate these ideas, their function, and diffusion in Italian society at the time.