Lessons from the grand tour. Sicily seeking a renewed attractivenes

One year after the beginning of the research study “Sicily as seen by foreign travellers: Architects on the Road”, this contribution addresses some issues concerning the role played by the systematic analysis of the foreign travellers’ experience in Sicily, for a shared acknowledgment of the authentic value of the Sicilian “landscape-cultural mosaic”. n the grounds of a landscape axiology, the Lost Paradise can be considered as an archetype of attraction, ataraxy and harmony, determining the surplus value which typically characterizes the superordinate entities which, like landscape, are not reducible to a sum of parts. The contribution presents some results of the research project aiming at producing and implementing a GeoDatabase on a WebGIS interface describing the experiences of the travelling architects who took part in the Grand Tour from the Eighteenth to the early Twentieth Century.