This work discusses how the study of the relation between writing and travelling can be a privileged viewpoint to analyse the upbringing and the intellectual production of some Brazilian traveller-writers, who travelled in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth. Taking into consideration the existence of different ways of travelling, this work deals with the theoretical proposition of two separate traveller-lineages, whose ideas about travelling,different from one another, were to achieve momentous repercussion in writing.These are Nabucos lineage and the modernists. In the former, the explicit preference for European culture would take their adepts both as intellectuals and travellers to cross the Atlantic in order to verify the cultural supremacy of the Old World; in the latter, they would break away from the subservient cultural model prevalent at that time; thus verification led to discovery. The path leading from verifying to discovering was subordinated to the purpose of creating a Brazilian cultural tradition that would justify the definitive inclusion of Brazil in the map of traveller- writers.