Le Guide Impossibili
5562 Pampa
Tierra Afuera e Tierra Adentro
Edited by Gianni Guadalupi. Texts by Richard Arthur Seymour, Lucio Victorio Mansilla, Manuel Ugarte
1991 / 180 PAGES.
Language: italiano
The word pampa, or “grass-covered plain, steppe”, was used by the conquistadores for the Argentinian prairies spreading from the Córdoba mountains to the Lower Paraná and from the Río de la Plata estuary to Patagonia. A vast, grassy ocean that travellers compared to the sea.
The main text in this book is by one of the most eccentric of the many noteworthy figures inhabiting 19th-century Argentina. Lucio Victorio Mansilla, scion of one of the wealthiest families in the country, was a journalist, soldier and politician who also proved a great activist in his lifetime. He set off for the mysterious Tierra Adentro unarmed and with practically no escort. For the first and only time, the natives received a genuine, brotherly and humane ambassador. Though his journey did not yield political results, the account he wrote of it, Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, is one of the most interesting and amusing of the entire Hispano-American repertoire. Alongside Colonel Mansilla’s work, we’ve chosen to present the diary written by Richard Arthur Seymour, a British pioneer who – though times were not yet ripe – dreamt of breeding livestock on the dangerous, unstable borders between Tierra Afuera and Tierra Adentro.