The author studies travel writing in the Italian context from a radically new point of view, focusing on 'domestic' - Italian - contemporary narratives about 'foreign' cultures and on their English translations. The following two questions raised respectively in the introduction and the conclusion, sum up the problematics of the book: 1) Why does a genre, which in its international (and predominantly Anglo-Saxon) tradition is as popular in Italy as it is elsewhere in the world, fail to get recognition when it originates from ‘home’ writers?; 2) On the other hand, why should an Italian book on Tibet, or Vietnam, be published in English – a language into which notoriously little is translated – when there are already plenty of volumes on the same subject written by English speaking authors? The search to these questions engages both writer and reader in revisiting the function of travel writing, its relation to translation as well as the role played by both forms of writing in the dynamics of cultural exchanges.