Since 1980, there has been a resurgence of interest in travel writing but many critics have recently deplored the fact that it has never been included in the literary canon. This work is a study of the causes and reasons for this 'resistance': the numerous travel accounts mentioned may, in fact, be considered as constituting a subsystem inserted into the wider system of European travels to Italy. Traditional travel accounts are also compared to ethnographic texts and modern guide-books so as to find out their differences and similarities in both style and content. The process of creation and consolidation of national identities and stereotypes is analysed here, and travellers and translators certainly helped in the spreading of certain ideas. Drawing from more than three hundred travel-books written between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, the author provides an image of Sicily as it was constructed by European travellers and supported by Italians and Sicilians themselves.