The Travelogue As Fragment:

Goethe's Italian Journey (1786-1788) and Gautier's Italia (1850)

In The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, Philippe LaCoue Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy define the fragment as the "romantic genre par excellence."  If we extended the fragment concept beyond the genre of Schlegel's Athenaeum, Novalis's Fragments, The Grains of Pollen, Lessing's Fragments of an Anonymous Person or Hugo's Dieu, it can be successfully applied to the travel narrative if understood as metonymy.  The travelogue is a sequence of fragmented memories, which even the traveler / author can partially remember.  Therefore structural unity is impossible even though the initial itinerary might create an allusion of cohesiveness.  Finally, the tourist's souvenir, be it a lemon or a piece of  Venetian glass is the ultimate fragment which can evoke the totality of the Italian experience.