Our first accidental Orientalist, Amalia Nizzoli, was barely 13 years old when, in 1819, she embarked upon a voyage with her parents to Egypt, where her uncle was employed as a physician by the son-in-law of the ruling Pasha, Muhammad Ali. When she published her memoirs of nine years of residence in Egypt some 22 years later, she did so by proxy. She herself was still traveling, so Francesco Cusani, a now forgotten erudite, patriot, and translator of Walter Scott, stood in for her with the publishing house, and provided a preface that put her narrative in its proper place. Following the logic of supplementarity that characterizes the placement of women's travel narratives within Orientalist discourse, Cusani first establishes the primacy of Nizzoli's male counterparts, whose abundance of writings (“copia dei libri”) has, he claims, rendered superfluous (“superflua”) any writings about Oriental “usi e costumi odierni” [present-day manners and customs] and then positions her as remedying a lack as only a woman can: