The beautiful country : tourism and the impossible state of destination Italy 9781442648722, 1442648724

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THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY

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The Beautiful Country Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy

STEPHANIE MALIA HOM

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2015 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4872-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Toronto Italian Studies Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hom, Stephanie Malia, 1975–, author The beautiful country : tourism and the state of destination, Italy/ Stephanie Malia Hom. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4872-2 (bound) 1. Tourism – Italy – History.  2. Tourism – Political aspects – Italy.  I. Title.  II. Series: Toronto Italian studies G155.I8H64 2015   338.4'79145   C2014-906498-5

University of Toronto Press is pleased to acknowledge the financial assistance of the University of Oklahoma to support the publication of this volume. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

To Allison Rayne, my best friend for more than half my life and all the years to come.

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Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  3 Texts 1  Codes of Travel: Italy’s Guidebook Tradition  29 2  Italian Montage: On Rhetoric and Representations  49 Practices 3  Destination Nation: The Grand Tour, Thomas Cook, and the Arrival of Mass Tourism  83 4  Tours of Duty: Touring Clubs, Fascist Agencies, and the Domestic Tourism Industry  105 5  Masses in Transit: The New Economy of Tourism in the Twentieth Century 127 Spaces 6  Italy without Borders: Simulacra, Simulation, and the Postmodern Grand Tour  155 7  Postmodern Passages: Souvenirs, Theme Parks, Outlet Malls, and the Body of the Simulated Nation  184

viii Contents

Conclusion 213 Notes  221 Bibliography  263 Index  293

Illustrations

2.1 Il dolce far niente, postcard, circa 1910 55 2.2 Etching of the Colosseum, Piranesi, Le vedute di Roma, circa 1740s 72 2.3 Postcard of the Colosseum, 2011  73 2.4 Postcard of Roman she-wolf with Romulus and Remus, 2011  74 2.5 Medium-scale montage postcard, Rome, 2011  78 2.6 Large-scale montage postcard, Rome, 2011  78 2.7 Small-scale montage postcard, Rome, 2011  79 3.1 Portrait of Thomas Cook, 1864  89 3.2 Thomas Cook and tourists at Pompeii, 1868  94 3.3 A Cook’s circular ticket, 1877  100 3.4 A Cook’s £5 circular note, 1870s  100 3.5 Daily meal coupons for Cook’s tourists, circa 1880  101 4.1 Touring Club Italiano’s inaugural Milan–Rome cycling excursion, 1895 109 4.2 The Colonia Novarese in Rimini, 1934  123 4.3 Membership card for the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, 1938  124 5.1 Rimini beach life circa 1920s  132 5.2 View of the Autostrada del Sole (Highway of the Sun), early 1960s 138 5.3 Fiat “Topolino” and camper, 1950s  138 5.4 First Autogrill near Milan, 1959  139 5.5 Alitalia plane with passengers, 1960s  141 6.1 Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, 2013  157 6.2 The Rialto Bridge, Campanile, and lagoon at the Venetian Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, 2013  160 6.3 Ca D’Oro and gondola, Venetian Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, 2013 160

x Illustrations

6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7

Tuscany at Tokyo DisneySea, 2005  167 Venice at Tokyo DisneySea, 2005  167 Front view of the Mercato shopping centre, Dubai, 2008  172 Interior view, Mercato shopping centre, Dubai, 2008  172 Faux-marble statue and house, Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, California, 2008  179 Street signs and model homes, Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, California, 2008  179 Detail of souvenir shop, Rome, 2010  188 A “Ciao Bella” souvenir T-shirt, 2011  190 A view of Italia in miniatura theme park, 2011  196 Garibaldi poster at the entrance to Italia in miniatura, 2011  198 Giants in a theme park against a Florentine duomo, Italia in miniatura  203 Valdichiana Outlet Village’s entrance, Tuscany, 2011  206 View of the passages through the Valdichiana Outlet Village, 2011 206

Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making, and it would not have been possible without the intellectual collaboration and emotional support of many individuals and institutions. The seeds of the manuscript first took root while I was a graduate student in Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. There I benefited enormously from the academic guidance and unflagging generosity of many, including Albert Ascoli, who introduced me to the rich complexities of literature and history; Nelson Graburn, who showed me the importance of tourism studies in theory and in practice; and Barbara Spackman, who always inspired me to think harder. The voice of Alan Dundes still whispers to me when I need it most. And none of this would have been possible without Mia Fuller, in whom I have found a sage mentor, role model, and lifelong friend. I also feel very fortunate to have landed among wonderful colleagues, past and present, at the University of Oklahoma, who have greatly enriched this book with constructive feedback and many delightful conversations. First and foremost, I owe special thanks to my colleagues in the Italian section – Andres Bagajewicz, Serafina Boggs, Jason Houston, Francesca Novello, and Monica Seger – who have been incredibly supportive throughout this project. I would also like to thank Marcia Chatelain, Kristen Dowell, Kirk and Charlotte Duclaux, Pamela Genova, Alice Kloker, Bob Lemon, Zach Messitte, Stephanie Pilat, Monica Sharp, Shizuka Tatsuzawa, and Logan Whalen, among many others, for discussions and friendship that have improved this book. I am also grateful to the Department of Modern Languages, Lit­ eratures, and Linguistics; the College of Arts and Sciences; the College of International Studies; the Office of International Programs; the Office

xii Acknowledgments

of the Vice-President for Research; the President’s Associates; and the Board of Regents at the University of Oklahoma for their generous support of my research and professional development. A year in residence at the American Academy in Rome thanks to the Lily B. Auchincloss Postdoctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies during 2010–11 was indispensable to the completion of this project, and the book is the richer for it. I enjoyed all the resources of Rome at my fingertips, enriched by dynamic discussions and long-lasting friendships with particular Fellows and Residents – Seth Bernard, Case Brown, Craig Gibson, Jay Hopler, Rachel Jacoff, Aparna Kesheviah, Jeremy Mende, Paul Rudy, Tyler Travillian, Adrian Van Allen, and Mike Waters – and the support and collegiality of the Academy staff – T. Corey Brennan, Paolo Brozzi, Christopher Celenza, Adele ChatfieldTaylor, Denise Galvio, Karl Kirchewey, Pina Pasquantonio, Cristina Puglisi, Mona Talbott, and the entire AAR library team. Grazie di cuore to all of you. I am tremendously grateful for the support, encouragement, and critical eye of Ron Schoeffel, editor extraordinaire, at the University of Toronto Press, who passed away while this manuscript was in revision. Ron was a tireless champion of Italian Studies, and I hope that this book, in some small way, will help to honour his memory. At the same press, I would like to thank Richard Ratzlaff for stepping into the editor’s role under very difficult circumstances and kindly offering his guidance and support. I would also like to offer my sincere thanks to three anonymous reviewers for their feedback, which helped me to make this book that much better. I am extremely grateful for the copyediting talents of Angela Wingfield and to Jeremy Mende, my fellow AAR Fellow and the principal of Mende Design, for creating the stunning book cover. I also owe many thanks to Theresa Duran for crafting the exquisite and thorough index. I would like to thank Lucas Bessire, Aileen Feng, Mia Fuller, Jason Houston, Scott Spradlin, and Rhiannon Welch for their valuable feedback on various iterations of the introduction and the chapters that follow. What is more, I was aided considerably by a grant for independent research on Venetian history and culture from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation as well as by the support of a fellowship at the Wolfsonian–Florida International University in Miami Beach. Within Italy, I am indebted to the many people whose assistance in archives, libraries, municipalities, and organizations proved essential to my research: Giovanna Rosselli and Luciana Senna at the Touring Club

Acknowledgments xiii

Italiano Archive (Milan); Lucia Sardo at the Fondazione Cini (Venice); Gessica Boni at the Istituzione Biblioteca Malatestiana (Cesena); Saverio Ferrazzo at the Automobile Club d’Italia (Vibo Valentia); and Marta Melgrati in guest relations at Valtur Ostuni holiday village. In Venice, I owe many thanks to Simon Levis-Sullam for his hospitality. In Rimini, I am thankful for the cooperation and generosity of Nadia Bizzocchi at the Biblioteca Gambalunga; Antonella Bianchi at Italia in miniatura; and Ferruccio Farina of the virtual Museo Balnea. In Rome, I owe many thanks to Diego Mercuri at Millenium Editrice, Marcello Panzironi at the Time Elevator Rome, and Giuli Liebman Parrinello at Università di Roma Tre. Elsewhere in Europe, I am extremely grateful to Paul Smith at the Thomas Cook Archive (Peterborough, United Kingdom) for sharing his outstanding knowledge of the company’s history with me. I have also had many fruitful conversations with Catherine Brice, Charles Burdett, Derek Duncan, Ruth Glynn, Scott McCabe, Catherine O’Rawe, David Picard, Mike Robinson, and John Urry – a great many thanks to you all. On the other side of the Atlantic, I am grateful for the numerous colleagues and friends in the United States and Canada who have productively challenged and invariably supported me throughout this entire project, such as Nezar AlSayyad, Cristina Bacchilega, Pamela Ballinger, Bob Davidson, Francesco Erspamer, Michael Herzfeld, Dean MacCannell, David Rifkind, Margaret Swain, and the members of the University of California–Berkeley Tourism Studies Work Group. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg deserve special thanks for being wonderful interlocutors and dear friends. I would also like to thank the faculty and graduate students at the following universities, who genially hosted me at their institutions and gave me invaluable feedback on earlier versions of the book’s chapters: Brown University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University–Villa La Pietra, Università di Roma Tre, University of Bristol, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Toronto. I also owe many thanks to the helpful staff of the Rare Books and Special Collections at the U.S. Library of Congress, the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the Bancroft Library at University of California–Berkeley, and the New York Public Library. To my friends from college, my journalist days, graduate school, and beyond, what would I do without your support and witty repartee? Many thanks go to Charles Carroll, Jenny Chio, Jonathan Combs-Schilling, Rachel Donadio, Rebecca Falkoff, Antonio Furgiuele,

xiv Acknowledgments

Paul Hurh, Joe Jordan, Dan Joss, Janaya Lasker-Ferretti, Tony Martire, Valerie McGuire, Saul Mercado, Stiliana Milkova, T. Alex Miller, Scott Millspaugh, John Moretti, Elisabetta Povoledo, Jane Reuter, Melanie Samson, Sara Troyani, Silvia Valisa, Maurizio Vito, Charlie Walton, and Karina Xavier. To those closest to me, words cannot express my deepest gratitude to all of you for nourishing our intellectual and emotional bonds and for being on this journey with me. You are my friends and my family, and I submit a heartfelt abbraccione to you all: Aileen Feng, Ed Garduno, Christina Hom and Trappeur Rahn, David Hom, Eugene and Chris Hom, Jay Hopler, Jennifer Madden and Jeff Reed, Paul Rudy, Jodi Sylvester, Kelli Sylvester, Nikki Sylvester, Rhiannon Welch, and especially to my best friend, Allison Rayne. Scott Spradlin, you are my heart. My mother, Patricia Hom, and my grandmother, Eleanor Garduno, are no longer here to offer their encouragement, but I imagine that they would have been proud. Their presence made me who I was, and their absence continues to make me who I am. Last, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my parents, Jim and Jan Sylvester, as well as the rest of the Sylvester, Hom, and Garduno families – including my faithful canine, Brownie – without whom neither this book nor my career in academia would have ever been possible. Grazie mille.

THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY

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Introduction

The hills around Rome are at their best in the springtime. The air, still crisp with winter, hints at warmer days with the smell of budding grass and newly tilled soil. Delicate rains saturate the landscape with renewed life, marked by almost impossible shades of kelly green. Poets and painters have long celebrated nature’s vernal revelry here in the Roman countryside, their words and watercolours immortalizing the place as a respite from the anxiety and ennui of modernity. Goethe, one of Italy’s most famous modern pilgrims, proclaimed that it had “restored [him] to the enjoyment of life, to the enjoyment of history, poetry, and of antiquities.”1 I, however, am admiring the verdant fantastic from my window on “The Fashion Bus,” hurtling through this pastoral wonderland at a ­hundred kilometres per hour. My destination is the Valmontone Fashion District, a colossal outlet mall, slapdash in pastel stucco, brand logos, and a shorthand of architectural styles. The bus exits the highway at a giant billboard upon which a stiletto-clad model poutingly declares in flaming caps, “I love shopping!” The mall approaches. All of my nascent contemplations on shopping love are cut short as a souvenir bag and a coupon booklet are thrust into my hands. These are thank-you tokens for taking the bus, and acknowledgments of my reduced carbon footprint, as well as hard-won kickbacks for my impending self-­imposed detention in the fashion district for the next seven hours. The bus winds its way through an asphalt parking lot of hatchbacked Fiats and finally slows to a stop in front of a gigantic cake-­ yellow arch that marks the entrance to the mall. I stumble off the bus and stare up at the archway. My thoughts turn to Roman emperors long dead. I think of the triumphal arches built to commemorate military victories and imperial visits and the founding of new colonies, all

4  The Beautiful Country

exultations of Rome’s ancient empire writ in marble and hubris. While the mall’s arch lacks the ornamentation of its ancient predecessors – it is more out-of-scale art deco than gilded gravitas – its function is nonetheless the same. I, along with six million other visitors each year, pass under this austere arch to mark our triumphant arrival at one of the largest outlet centres in Italy and, symbolically, to celebrate the metaphorical victory of consumer society and globalized empire. The arch opens onto a palm-lined boulevard and the mall beyond, which is a strange, open-air warren of name-brand storefronts that recreate the vernacular architecture of places elsewhere. One passageway evokes the French Quarter in New Orleans with balconies clad in florid ironwork. Another suggests a Swiss alpine village with wide-gabled chalets decorated in pastel colours. Yet most of the Valmontone Fashion District is built in an architectural style that can only be called “generic outlet”: it is a nondescript village with wide avenues, outdoor seating, small storefronts, and Mediterranean touches (that is, red tile roofs, earth-tone stucco).2 It is many places and also none at all. Beyond the arch in the other direction I see the serpentine tracks of a roller coaster silhouetted against the Prenestini Mountains to the east. There is also a Ferris wheel, a tall metal tower built to drop people at terrifyingly high speeds, and two turrets that flank a spaceship-like castle. This is Rainbow Magic Land, a theme park that opened in May 2011, and it is a self-declared space of pure fantasy. All is unreal here. Cartoonish forms and widespread frippery remind the visitor of this premise at every turn. There are pink rooftops, a “flying island,” and a dreamscape distortion of a chateau-turned-restaurant. Attractions called Mystika, Magic Street, and Maison Houdini also reinforce the idea that magic, or all that is beyond reality, is the prime currency of place. Yet at the far end of the park, history rather than magic is on display in the twelve-hundred-seat amphitheatre called the Palabaleno. Here, gladiatorial combats are presented several times a day on a stage reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum. Swords and tridents clash under neon lights. Choreographed battles are scored to dramatic music. Emperors descend from the sky on aerial silks while female dancers pirouette and sashay in praise. The performance culminates in high-flying acrobatics: toga-clad performers somersault off a Russian swing, which slingshots them through the air at dizzying heights only to be caught on an enormous heraldic banner. Ancient Rome is the attraction here, even if it is more circus act than history lesson. This is a simulated Rome, an empire resurrected in a

Introduction 5

simulacrum of the Colosseum. Roman performers simulate historical Romans, and a Roman audience pays to watch. I struggle to comprehend the meaning of these bewildering levels of signification, which, like nesting dolls, continue to open up new questions. Why are Romans watching fake gladiators? Why are they shopping among fake Swiss chalets? Are these theme-park gladiators related to those who hornswoggle money from tourists in exchange for photos at the real Colosseum? How is the fake Roman Empire performed at the theme park related to the empire of globalization consecrated by the outlet mall next door? Why are the theme park and the outlet mall so very popular? How did we come to all of this? At Valmontone a hyperreal bread and circuses emerge in the spaces within and between the theme park and the outlet mall. These are two geographies of leisure that reanimate the crowd-pleasing means of appeasement that was once public policy in ancient Rome (panem et circenses). And as in ancient Rome, where the bread and circuses diverted attention away from civic virtues and real political engagement, substituting them with the immediate gratification of food and games, the bread and circuses instantiated at Valmontone distract from the social stratification that is reinforced by consumer society – the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots – and the consequences of the globalized empire that are wrought upon us. These consequences of globalization interest me, particularly in a place like Italy that has such a strong reputation for resisting commodification through historic preservation, artisanal craftsmanship, espresso hegemony, and the like. At first glance, there seems to be a stark contrast between the Italy that embodies a preconceived idea of tradition linked to art, architecture, and the realm of the ruin, and the Italy of theme parks and outlet malls. It is the contrast between the Forum in Rome and the fake one at Cinecittà. Marble sculpture and plaster cast, slow food and McDonald’s, Gardaland and Salò – real and fake coexist harmoniously and often interchangeably here. It is the country’s grande bellezza (great beauty). This book delves into such contrasts in an effort to understand how and why Romans today travel to see a theme park interpretation of their own city, why tourists cheerfully pose with fake gladiators, and why Italians shop at an outlet mall posing as a global village. I discovered that all of these places are inexorably linked to the advent of modern mass tourism. The following chapters explore the rise of Italy as a powerful imaginary born of mass tourism, or what I call destination Italy. It is an

6  The Beautiful Country

imaginary that is both syncretistic and synergistic, existing simultaneously as many things. Destination Italy is first and foremost an idealized land of leisure. Millions of tourists visit the peninsula each year, seeking to immerse themselves in la dolce vita, and even more of them tour the simulacra of destination Italy with similarly pleasurable aims. Thus, destination Italy becomes instantiated everywhere, from Valmontone to beyond, and its power of purchase as a model destination has been legitimated over centuries by phenomena like Christian pilgrimage, the Grand Tour, and organized vacations. This touristic imaginary, too, emerges as a forceful analogue to the modern Italian nation state, which has often been perceived as weak and fractured since Unification in 1861 (even though its perseverance suggests otherwise). Destination Italy’s very cohesion is enacted by stereotypes that situate it within a romanticized past and accordingly vague ideas of tradition and authenticity. In such a way, Italy as destination emerges in the present day as a symbolic respite from the stratifying forces of globalization in the age of late capitalism. Even though it is imbricated within this neoliberal order, it appears to remain apart. The following pages, then, track the development of this dynamic imaginary across salient texts, practices, and spaces, journeying and looping like a murmuration of Roman starlings through the many contours of destination Italy. Destination Italy Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world. In 2012 one billion tourists went on holiday and generated 10 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product (US$1.3 trillion).3 It creates US$3 billion in business every day, and the growth only continues.4 If globalization is defined by the increasing interconnectedness of people vis-à-vis technology, political economy, and cultural exchange, then tourism is unquestionably one of its most potent expressions. While it is capable of lifting people and nations out of poverty, tourism is also just as likely to damage the environment, reduce standards of living for the already poor, and, at its worst, cater to the darkest impulses of the human condition by trafficking women and children for sex.5 Yet tourism and its doubleedged potential for prosperity and exploitation are still regarded as frivolous by many academics, as if somehow the pleasures of tourism exempt it from the rigorous interrogation of its long-term cultural impacts. This book seeks to remedy that lacuna by tracing the emergence

Introduction 7

of destination Italy – a touristic imaginary that begins with the arrival of mass tourism to Italy in 1864, just three years after the country’s political unification, and culminates in the territorialization of this now globalized imaginary at the beginning of the twenty-first century in places like theme parks and outlet malls. Italy’s national identity is inseparable from its identity as a tourist destination, and the history of modern mass tourism is inextricably bound to the politics of the modern Italian state. Italy has played a critical – and heretofore little studied – role in the development of the global mass tourism industry. Its status as a prime travel destination was inaugurated by Christian pilgrims to Rome during the Renaissance, solidified by the Grand Tour of the late-eighteenth century, and packaged for the masses in the nineteenth century by Baedeker and Murray guidebooks as well as British tour operator Thomas Cook. By the end of the nineteenth century, foreign tourists on organized tours were arriving in Italy in droves, while equally high numbers of Italians were moving elsewhere (for example, North and South America, Australia, and newly established colonies like Eritrea) in what was the largest voluntary emigration from any country in recorded world history.6 This mass movement of Italians outward – some twenty million are estimated to have left between the 1880s and the 1930s – was countered by a mass movement of tourists inward, which, unlike Italian emigration, continues to this day. The origins of modern mass tourism are clearly rooted in Italy, and specifically in the Grand Tour whereby foreigners from Britain and northern Europe, like Byron and Goethe, came to Italy to complete their aesthetic education. Here they learned how to see the past, to contemplate the beauty of art and ruins, and to reflect upon the anomie of modern life. Their well-trodden routes through the peninsula standardized modern touring practices, while their ubiquitous gazes sacralized sites like the Colosseum as tourist attractions and transformed heritage into a touristic industry. Destination Italy, then, became a model for tourist destinations everywhere. So aligned did Italy become with tourism that it has consistently been one of the top five destinations in the world (along with France, the United States, Spain, and China), according to the UN World Tourism Organization. More than half of all international tourists made Europe their destination of choice in 2012, and 46.4 million of them visited Italy.7 The World Bank reports that these tourists contributed approximately US$45 billion to the Italian economy, roughly 8 per cent of its gross

8  The Beautiful Country

domestic product.8 Yet these statistics only monitor the impact of international tourism. They do not account for the widespread practices of domestic tourism in Italy, which include the well-established tradition of Ferragosto (the holiday that marks the start of August vacation), winter breaks (settimane bianche), religious holidays (such as Christmas and Easter), and long weekends (weekend del ponte). Put simply, both foreign tourists and Italians alike love to visit destination Italy. Tourism is an industry unique among all others in that its primary “product” is a country, and national governments figure centrally in the creation and management of these imagined commodities – none more so than Italy. In fact, the Italian nation state has been tied to destination Italy since Unification. Whereas the notion of Italy as a modern political state was and is marked by debates that frame the country as belated, backward, divided, or somehow lacking in civil society, Italy as destination has always signified a place that is remarkably cohesive in character and culture.9 For example, the political state is heavily polarized by regionalism, the strongest line drawn between north and south. Destination Italy is instead thought of as a singular landscape unified by natural beauty and cultural monuments. The political state deals with separatist movements like that of the right-wing Lega Nord (Northern League) that espouses independence for a proposed state called Padania. Destination Italy is represented as being inhabited by Italians who are united in a collective life of leisure. Or, as one guidebook puts it, “Everyone loves the Italians. How can you not? They do, after all, live in a land where the sun always shines and work is something done elsewhere. They ooze style, enjoy the best food in the world and drive with enviable abandon.”10 In destination Italy, land and people cohere in stereotypes that reinforce its reputation as a touristic paradise. It is home to la dolce vita. The Italian nation state, however, might be seen as being united by its very disunity. Put another way, the modern Italian state metaphorically owes its existence to its inability to exist: “l’Italia fatta” (Italy made) is precisely “l’Italia non fatta” (Italy not made). This is its constitutive paradox, that is, the impossible foundation of the ­nation state. In such a way, the Italian state might be considered a postmodern construct for it is based on an insuperable juxtaposition between being made and not made.11 Even today, academics, journalists, and politicians debate whether “Saremo mai un paese normale?” (Will we ever be a normal country?), the question posed by Mario Isnenghi and Emilio Gentile in a 2011 newspaper opinion piece.12 According to

Introduction 9

Gentile, Italy is a country that questions its national identity so intensely and continuously that it evacuates any sentiments of national belonging among its citizens. What results is a nation state that is an “empty simulacrum.”13 It is a form without content. Or, perhaps a form comprising “discontents,” as Paul Ginsborg has famously written.14 The Risorgimento made its form, but the contents of the Italian state remain unsettled and indeterminate. Yet this paradox between form and content is nothing new in Italy. It has circulated in debates on Italian character long before Unification, with foreign travellers like Madame de Staël establishing themselves as authorities on Italian character, customs, literature, and even politics.15 In response to de Staël and others, Giacomo Leopardi, perhaps the greatest Italian poet of the Risorgimento, composed his own treatise on “the present state of the customs of the Italians” in 1824. He argued that the nation of Italy was distinguished from all others by its emptiness and, specifically, by its lack of a real social bond, a foundation for morality, and a conservative principle for society.16 According to Leopardi, the problem with Italy and Italians is not so much that they are premodern but rather that they are something akin to being postmodern.17 They are defined by the very absence of the nation. If a postmodern disposition characterizes Italians and their nation state, then destination Italy actualizes this disposition in touristic form and content. One strand of this book therefore highlights the mutually constitutive relationship between nation and destination and, in particular, the ways in which tourism both reinforces and capitalizes upon the Italian state as a postmodern construct. The primary goal of this book, however, is to illuminate the ways that mass tourism creates destination Italy in text, practice, and space.18 Its three sections detail the features of this touristic imaginary by tracking the way in which destination Italy was formed by the following interrelated developments: (1) the production of texts and stereotypes that frame Italy as a land of leisure (“Texts”); (2) the development of international and domestic tourism industries around this new Italian touristic imaginary (“Practices”); and (3) the creation of postmodern built environments that reproduce this imaginary on a global scale so as to ensure and even expand the popularity of Italy in the wider cultural imagination (“Spaces”). Tellingly, more people experience Italy today as tourists in places like Las Vegas (for example, the Venetian Hotel and Casino, the Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace) and Tokyo (for example, Mediterranean Harbor at Tokyo DisneySea) than by

10  The Beautiful Country

actually visiting Italy. Precisely because of this global reach, destination Italy emerges as the foremost locus in which millions upon millions of people (Italians included) encounter, interpret, and reify a touristic understanding of Italy and Italian culture year after year. Although the built environments of destination Italy are in fact simulacra – copies that are visited more than is the original – they do not resemble the empty simulacrum “incapable of arousing shared ideals, sentiments, and emotions in Italians” that Gentile has argued of the Italian state.19 They are something much more. They arouse a shared understanding of Italy as a powerful touristic imaginary. On the one hand, these simulacra instantiate the hallmarks of globalization by erasing territorial borders between Italy and elsewhere, commodifying Italian culture for mass consumption, and generating billions of dollars in the name of Italy as part of an industry that employs one in every eleven people on earth.20 On the other hand, the tourism industry and the Italian government have consistently framed destination Italy as something apart from globalization or, precisely, something of its very opposite. Italy is publicized as the land of quaint medieval hill towns rather than of sprawling suburbs; the producer of handcrafted leather goods, not mass-produced schlock; and the purveyor of locally grown, kilometre-zero cuisine that stands against all forms of fast food. The fact that the Fascist regime (1922–43) completely refurbished a number of those quaint Tuscan hill towns, that illegal migrants make many of those “Made in Italy” leather goods in sweatshops outside of Florence, or that Italy ranks tenth in the world in the number of McDonald’s restaurants by country is hardly ever brought to light.21 In such ways, destination Italy becomes linked to ideas of tradition and authenticity that have been invented and staged primarily for tourists. This patina of tradition and authenticity dissociates destination Italy from the messiness of globalization. It structures the fantasy of an Italy that does not fully take part in, say, the growing inequality between rich and poor or the escalation of environmental catastrophes related to climate change – two direct consequences of globalization and its underpinning ideology, neoliberalism. In this fantasy, destination Italy remains a country of piccole industrie (small industries) and familybased capitalism in which the social relations between people trump the economies of scale. The natural landscape is all cypress groves, vineyards, and olive trees unaffected by global warming. Urban areas stand free of cookie-cutter sprawl and slick architectural eyesores. Sometimes this touristic illusion is shattered by debacles like the wreck

Introduction 11

of the cruise ship Costa Concordia off the Tuscan coast or the ongoing rubbish crisis in Naples. For the most part, however, destination Italy is understood as a signifier of tradition and authenticity standing against globalization. This fantasy solidifies destination Italy’s popular appeal. It not only opposes globalization but also symbolically counters the fickle anxieties of the postmodern condition. Indeed, destination Italy’s illusory authenticity appeals to tourists who, trapped within their iron cages, are “condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for authenticity, to see if [they] can catch a glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity, or purity of others.”22 In his seminal work The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Dean MacCannell argues that the expansion of modern society is inherently linked to the development of modern mass leisure, international tourism, and sightseeing in particular.23 He contends that the tourist is on a search for authenticity whereby she can rescue the modern from its own tendencies towards self-destruction. MacCannell elaborates: “The need to be postmodern can thus be read as the same as the desire to be a tourist: both seek to empower modern culture and its conscience by neutralizing everything that might destroy it from within.”24 Tourists, then, become “unsung armies of semioticians” who hold the power to re-signify places as destinations and to sustain fantasies on a massive scale.25 They uphold destination Italy as a signifier that neutralizes not only the psychic destruction within that comes with being modern but also the social and environmental destruction that is wrought from without by globalization. In such a way, destination Italy with its 46.4 million tourists each year, and the untold millions more that visit the vast array of its simulacra, might just be the most pervasive – and powerful – touristic imaginary in the world. What is at stake in such an analysis is a conceptualization of destination Italy that gives equal weight to the original and the copy, the real and the fake, in order to show that the invisible product of tourism depends not simply on a specific geography but rather on a hyperreal constellation of attractions. In a secondary vein, this study of destination Italy also offers a rethinking of the modern Italian state through the lens of tourism, and, specifically, of the way in which tourism underscores the already postmodern disposition of a state that exists figuratively in the juxtaposition between fatta (made) and non fatta (not made). Likewise, the impossible state of Italy calls into question ideas about

12  The Beautiful Country

the postmodern in general, especially as they are expressed in the built environment. Architectural forms offer especially fecund meeting grounds for Italy, tourism, and the postmodern. The analyses in the book’s last section, “Spaces,” build on Fredric Jameson’s theorizations of postmodernism as well as the pioneering studies of architecture and modern Italian identities.26 They also draw particular inspiration from Jean Baudrillard’s work on simulation, which challenges the very concept of “imaginary” itself. In the present era of unending semiotic breakdown Baudrillard writes that simulation has replaced representation. It “generate[s] models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal,” and erases all distinctions between real and imaginary, original and copy, true and false.27 It is the intention of this work, then, to destabilize the model of destination Italy at the very moment it begins to coalesce. By engaging simulacra and simulation to do so, it consciously reflects the slipperiness of the postmodern as well as the constitutive paradox of the Italian state. All is at once made and not made. In such ways, the final section attempts to both complicate and short-circuit – much like the operation of simulation itself – the closed loop of literature and scholarship routinely enlisted in the imagining of modern Italy. Much academic research, too, has insightfully explored the relationship between Italy, tourism, and architecture, art, film, and travel literature, respectively. These are critical intersections at which new ways of seeing became linked to an aesthetic sensibility specifically defined as Italian. Such intersections are excluded from this book because they have already been treated extensively by other scholarship.28 For instance, ruin gazing and Renaissance art were the primary attractions of the Grand Tour in the late-eighteenth century. Scholars have documented the way in which the travellers’ visual practices established a sightseeing canon in Italy and, in so doing, laid the foundations for the mass touristic consumption of place.29 Similarly, scholars from a number of disciplines have laid the foundations for this book about destination Italy. Building on their work, the following chapters engage an interdisciplinary methodology that combines techniques of literary criticism, cultural studies, archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork. They also bring a literary sensibility to spatial inquiry by elucidating the linkages between literary devices (that is, guidebook tropes) and the manner in which they frame the built environment. Such an interdisciplinary approach aims to ­capture the many ways that destination Italy was and continues to be

Introduction 13

constructed, debated, and negotiated as a touristic imaginary among different texts, objects, narratives, and spaces. This book ultimately reveals the ways in which the idea of destination Italy becomes conflated with the very idea of tourism, and in which modern touristic praxis itself becomes inseparable from the model established by Italy – the beautiful country of tourists and toured. On the Postmodern The cool morning haze of Venice makes everything seem just a bit out of focus. It blurs the already soft edges of decaying palazzi and enshrouds bridges in mist like an earthbound virga. Canals transform into a muted web of slate-silver ribbons entangling the city. All is a hollow quiet. It is early enough in the morning that few people are awake and even fewer are out on the streets. I am up and languorously make my way through the haze to Piazza San Marco, the city’s heart, and find the piazza empty, spared for the moment from the daily photographic assault of tourists still to come. I am alone for the time being with only the pigeons, Saint Mark’s Basilica, neatly stacked café chairs, and surprisingly two Buddhist monks dressed in bright-orange robes. It is an experience of such quiet, blissful stillness that I think I have perhaps reached nirvana, which of course seems only confirmed by the unexpected presence of the two monks. Then I watch as one monk produces a digital camera from seemingly out of nowhere, and the other makes his way over to the porphyry statues on the side of the basilica. He touches a statue lightly with one hand and flashes a happy smile for the camera. The photo is snapped and instantly becomes a digital memory, a once-in-a-many-lifetimes Kodak moment. If tourism really is a sacred journey, then Venice represents one of its most frequently travelled paths to enlightenment.30 The majority of Italy’s 46.4 million tourists each year make a stop in Venice. Most are day trippers who only visit for a few hours before returning to their cruise ships and tour buses. Complaints abound that Venice is turning into something like Disneyland. Tourists arrive for the day as they would at the theme park, and take pictures, ride gondolas, buy postcards, and leave. Few people actually live here any more. It just might be “the first postmodern city, selling no product other than itself and its multiple images.”31 Yet Venice is a crucial part of destination Italy as a whole. The greater touristic imaginary draws in more tourists and sells more souvenirs than does Venice alone, and indeed

14  The Beautiful Country

the paraphernalia of this invisible commodity has infiltrated almost every corner of the country. It takes the form of a souvenir stand laden with magnets, key chains, snow globes, and David figurines near the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It is also the open-air tour bus that speeds by the Colosseum in Rome. It is the postcard for sale, tucked away next to the cash register of a local bar in a small village like Amatrice, home of pasta all’amatriciana. Of course, it is also the tourist guidebook. Guidebooks have long influenced the behaviour of tourists by directing them where to go and telling them what to see. At the same time, they reinforce the well-known stereotypes about all destinations. In the case of Italy, guidebook stereotypes are remarkably consistent (especially in English-language works), and they tend to present the country as something of a beautiful and passionate bacchanal composed of natural scenery, artistic treasures, culinary wonders, and laid-back inhabitants. The Lonely Planet guidebook provides a good example:32 This land of vibrant, expressive people has given the world pasta and pizza, Da Vinci and Michelangelo, Dante and Machiavelli, Catholicism and a vast array of saints and martyrs, Verdi and Pavarotti, Fellini and Sophia Loren, not to mention the Mafia, a remarkable sense of style and la dolce vita. In Italy you can visit Roman ruins, study the art of the Renaissance, stay in tiny medieval hill towns, go mountaineering in the Alps and Apennines, feel romantic in Venice, participate in traditional festivals and see more beautiful churches that you imagined could exist in one country. Some people come simply to enjoy the food and wine.

While printed editions are rapidly being replaced by those downloaded onto smart phones and iPads, the guidebook, whether in print or digital form, still fragments and flattens the very destination it describes by reducing it to a hierarchy of tourist attractions.33 Destination Italy becomes simplified and signified in the language of touristic metonyms; it is nothing but ruins, hill towns, pizza, churches, la dolce vita, Sophia Loren. Gone are Italy’s real inhabitants and anything of the actual reality of the land described. In this way, as Roland Barthes so famously declared, the guidebook truly becomes an agent of blindness.34 These operations of flattening and fragmentation are likewise the well-documented characteristics of postmodernism. Guidebooks not only embody the “new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” that defines the postmodern, but also reflect the “fundamental mutation in the object world itself – now

Introduction 15

become a set of texts or simulacra – and in the disposition of the subject.”35 It is a text that represents a destination in visual and verbal fragments (more montage than narrative) that is also powerful enough to mediate the behaviour of its tourist-readers in situ. The guidebook instructs them in the practice of the superficial: monuments are to be checked off a list, pictures are to be taken, and cities (even countries) are simply things to be “done.” That the guidebook’s development is so intimately connected to that of destination Italy raises interesting questions about the formative intersections between Italy and the postmodern. One of the pre-eminent theorists of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, in an essay called “The Existence of Italy,” examines the crises of representation in realism, modernism, and postmodernism as they relate to film and its histories. Interestingly, the titular Italy is nowhere to be found. Rather, Jameson implies that “Italy” is the metaphorical result of the dialectical operations intrinsic to capitalism.36 He draws his title and inspiration from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s famous essay on the culture industry. In their discussion of the ways that the culture industry exercises control through the power of repetition, the illusion of chance, and the totality of enterprise Horkheimer and Adorno write: “In the detailed reports on the modestly luxurious pleasure trip organized by the magazine for the lucky competition winner – preferably a shorthand typist who probably won through contacts with local powers-that-be – the powerlessness of everyone is reflected … Industry is interested in human beings only as its customers and employees … One has only the choice of conforming or being consigned to the backwoods.”37 They argue that form is privileged over content and that this mere approximation of substance is accepted as such by the masses without any question. In such a way, the magazine’s detailed accounts of pleasure trips (form) substitute for actual trips (content) that will never be taken. Horkheimer and Adorno confirm: “What is offered is not Italy, but evidence that it exists.”38 Italy exists because the glossy pages of the magazine say it is so, and we believe it as such. Yet this is not exactly the promise of Italy on offer but rather the dream of destination Italy. The magazine account is the representation of a reality expressed in and through tourism. As a form without content, destination Italy again becomes not only linked to, but also expressive of, the postmodern. This is not so different from Leopardi’s argument in his 1824 Discorso that the problem with Italy was that it is always already postmodern. It is a state (form) without citizens or sentiments of national belonging

16  The Beautiful Country

(content). It seems to bypass the modern entirely. All of this is to say that tourism marks a concerted effort to put forward the un-presentable in presentation, as with guidebooks to Italy or magazine accounts of pleasure trips. And if the very attempt to present the un-presentable describes the postmodern condition, as Jean-François Lyotard has argued, then tourism might just be its most widespread practice, and destination Italy one of its most poignant expressions.39 The point is that destination Italy is inherently linked to both the modern and the postmodern, and perhaps for this reason it has remained such a cardinal point of orientation for many well-known theorists of modernity. For Walter Benjamin, who travelled extensively in the country, the historical disintegration that was visible in Italy’s ruins, particularly in Naples, spoke not only to the uneven development of capitalist order but also to the impermanence, porosity, corruption, and economic self-interest of modern social relations.40 He was struck by the fact that everything in Naples was for sale and that every action was motivated by economic gain, as is still the stereotype today. In particular, Benjamin noted that life went on as a tourist show here. “Everything that the foreigner desires, admires, and pays for is ‘Pompeii,’” he wrote. “‘Pompeii’ makes the gypsum imitations of the temple ruins, the necklaces out of lumps of lava, and the louse-filled personage of the tour guide irresistible.”41 The touristic spectacle and historical decay that were on display in Naples led Benjamin to read the city as a concrete expression of historically transient truth, its porous social formations and spatial anarchy counterpoints to the Parisian arcades. Thus, destination Italy exists simultaneously as many things: a powerful touristic imaginary, a counterpart to the Italian state, an expression of the postmodern, an inspiration for historical materialism, and a repository of tradition and authenticity that figuratively opposes globalization. The introduction of destination Italy into the academic discourse about the modern Italian state at once raises questions about the transformation of territorial borders and the creation of national subjects, that is, the making of Italy and Italians in a nation fundamentally tied to tourism. How are destinations narrated differently than are nations and by what texts? What is the relationship of touristic objects, like postcards and souvenirs, to destination and nation? At the same time, destination Italy raises a different set of theoretical questions that pertain to the postmodern condition – what Lyotard declared an “epoch of slackening,” and Jameson, a moment in which “depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces.”42 In this moment, signifying bonds continuously loosen and re-align while signs

Introduction 17

unfix and re-assemble. Destination Italy, too, goes mobile and becomes a floating signifier of itself in the de-territorialized geographies of touristic space. It exists autonomously in places like Las Vegas and Dubai, and in forms like shopping malls and theme parks. It offers an opportunity not simply to reiterate the theories of Lyotard and Jameson but also to resuscitate something new from them about the postmodern condition in our contemporary moment. In short, destination Italy harnesses the very artifice and disorientation that defines the postmodern to offer a fleeting perception of relief from the anxieties of globalization that concern those subjects – all of us – caught up in its effects. Travels in Italian Hyperreality In the mid-1970s Umberto Eco famously took a trip through the western United States and specifically to its most postmodern geographies: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and, of course, Disneyland. The latter, he writes, is a whole, imitative machine that sustains a hallucinatory confusion between copy and original, be it a reproduction of the French Quarter in New Orleans or Main Street USA.43 In his opinion, Disneyland is an “absolute fake” that makes clear that the buildings, jungles, rivers, et cetera reproduced within its confines are known as just that, reproductions. With this admission of fakery, however, Disneyland creates a genuine or “absolutely real” desire to consume these illusions and, likewise, the desire to buy the very real (and profitable) merchandise born thereof. It is the ultimate merger of consumerism and simulacrum. In this age of simulation, destination Italy, too, becomes entangled in the orders of simulacra. Its copies have become the dominant models of Italy around the world; for instance, the most visited form of Venice today is the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and Macao. Not only do these resorts together constitute the largest hotel complex in the world, but also their collective geographic area is greater than the city of Venice itself.44 Likewise, more than twenty-five million people a year visit copies of Rome, Florence, and Venice at Tokyo DisneySea, Japan’s most popular tourist attraction.45 Still others experience simulated Italies on a smaller scale, say, in the form of gondola rides on Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, or of housing developments modelled after Italian regions, like the Tuscany subdivision in Norman, Oklahoma. Simply put, the fake is more frequented than the real. Visited by countless millions, these Italian simulacra are especially privileged sites for understanding the mutually constitutive relationship between destination Italy and the Italian state for they materialize

18  The Beautiful Country

the postmodern disposition of the nation state as well as conflate Italy with tourism. This is hyperreal Italy. To study Italian simulacra, then, is to build on the voluminous scholarship about Italian public space and civic architecture as well as postmodern design. Indeed, the architectural history of Europe cannot be written without a consideration of the Italian Renaissance nor can the postmodern be theorized without a consideration of the built environment. Yet few of these studies account for postmodern spaces expressly marked as Italian.46 The choice to analyse these simulated spaces in the book’s final section – instead of, say, textual constructions of space or other forms of representation – is meant not only to bring together Italian architecture and postmodern space but also to challenge assumptions about these very concepts. How is a space “Italian” if it is a simulacrum? In what ways have stereotypes about destination Italy mediated these hyperreal forms? And if space is linked to the malleable notions of tradition and authenticity that are figuratively affixed to Italy, how might that reify the postmodern? Italian simulacra mark a return to an idea of Italy as tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, and unabashedly homogeneous – a thickening in response to the epoch of slackening. For hyperreal Italy, culture (specifically articulated as Italian) achieves such a degree of autonomy within the limits imposed by simulation that it appears to disappear, not by way of extinction but rather in becoming universal.47 Thus one thinks there is nothing unusual about a forty-storey, US$2.4 billion hotel and casino resort in Macao that replicates the city of Venice, or a Japanese theme park boasting a full-scale duplicate of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. In becoming universal through simulation, destination Italy exists ­everywhere. From the micro-dimensions of a souvenir to the mega-­ expanses of a casino-resort, its extensive diffusion throughout all orders of hyperreality establish Italy as destination as one of the great models of postmodernity on a par with Disneyland, Las Vegas, the Musée Grévin, and the Westin Bonaventure. It is arguably even more pervasive. In Las Vegas, tellingly, three of its most popular casino-­ resorts are “Italian”: the Bellagio, Caesar’s Palace, and the Venetian. It is the Grand Tour writ postmodern, condensed and resurrected on the Las Vegas Strip. In Las Vegas and elsewhere, destination Italy masquerades as a stable sign that signifies vague notions of tradition and authenticity. It is a masquerade that again typically manifests in architectural form. Under

Introduction 19

the shaded portico of an outlet mall built to look like a medieval Tuscan village, or below a faux window styled in Venetian Gothic overlooking a Las Vegas casino floor, one experiences the illusion of momentary displacement, that is, to a “real” Tuscan village or Venetian palazzo. In such ways, these simulated environments temporarily stage the illusion of authenticity and lend a metaphorical glimpse into a time and place seemingly undisturbed by postmodernity. This is staged authenticity in the age of globalization.48 Moreover, this illusion placates the guilt and anxiety related to consumer society and the high-carbon hubris of globalization. “Brand­ scapes” are increasingly dressed up as Italy, like the Borgata mall in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Mercato shopping centre in Dubai, among many others. In Dubai, that locus of hypermodernity and excess consumption, the Mercato merges Tuscan hill town and Venetian Gothic into a bizarre architectural pastiche. Its exterior is anchored by a portego characteristic of a Venetian palace and by a pastel-coloured bell tower reminiscent of Giotto’s campanile in Florence. Inside, Italian names mark every passageway (for example, Via Roma), escalators are dressed up to look like the Rialto bridge, interior colonnades are outfitted with fake heraldic crests, and brick finishes are distressed to give the impression of age. Yet the illusion is quickly dispelled by the Starbucks, the Nike store, and the many other brand-name shops tucked away under the mall’s fake loggias. Italianness disguises consumption at the Mercato. Even the name of the shopping mall – mercato means “market” in Italian – provides camouflage. The name, along with the architectural pastiche, counterfeit antiquation, and heraldic crests, recalls the piccole industrie (small industries) that once characterized patterns of production and consumption throughout the Italian peninsula. This economic model privileged the artisanal, the small-scale, and the personal relationships between producers and consumers. In many respects, this is still the model that tourists in Italy come to expect, as demonstrated by the extreme popularity of the San Lorenzo leather market, one of Florence’s most popular attractions. Indeed, piccole industrie stand as the antithesis to the faceless anonymity and mass-produced merchandise that dominate industrialized society in late capitalism. At the Mercato in Dubai the facade of Italy encases this globalized temple of commodities. It masks the primal scene of hyper-consumption. By creating the illusion of temporary displacement to a site of piccole industrie, this iteration of hyperreal

20  The Beautiful Country

Italy disavows the guilt and anxiety associated with the conspicuous consumption taking place within the Mercato’s simulated walls. Beneath this veneer of tradition and authenticity the arcades of globalization take shape. Accordingly, this opens up questions about Italian hyperreality and, specifically, the ways in which these simulacra of Italy simultaneously destabilize and re-stabilize the limits of nation and destination. To suggest a possible answer, a return to Disneyland is in order. Umberto Eco describes an interesting trick that Disneyland plays on its visitors: “[it] permits itself to present its reconstructions as masterpieces of falsification,” and, by confessing their illusory nature, what Disneyland really produces is desire for those illusions.49 It creates a genuine will to buy commodities inspired by masterpieces of falsification (for example, a Jungle Cruise T-shirt and an “It’s a Small World” snow globe). Hyperreal Italy encapsulates such a consumer ideology. Guilt assuaged, it stimulates the desire to consume while sustaining the illusion of a search for authenticity fulfilled. Put another way, hyperreal Italy evokes a time and a place in which the sensible and the intelligible still align with one another, and what body and gaze both perceive still corresponds to “what I can do.”50 This illusion of re-alignment proves a moment of resistance to the disorientation, liquidity, fragmentation, and depthlessness intrinsic to the postmodern. This is what is meant by “the good life” (the Mercato’s slogan): a temporary reprieve from the overwhelming pressures of a globalized, networked, consumer society that render a person tremendously connected and yet ever the more isolated from others and oneself. Indeed, the postmodern forms of Italy as destination – outlet malls, theme parks, casino-resorts, suburbs, souvenir shops – have emerged as the unlikely spaces for this respite. Yet this reprieve is only a hallucination, the mirage of a life of leisure, la dolce vita, a tourist’s life: this is the destination of Italy. The Method of Montage The following chapters adopt montage as the chosen method with which to examine the relationship between destination Italy and modern mass tourism. Taking a cue from Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, the montage, as the organizing principle of historical materi­ alism, dialectically juxtaposes images and fragments to simultane­ ously reveal as well as unsettle ur-forms of history, myth, and nature.51 Benjamin was concerned with the concrete representation of truth and

Introduction 21

the ways that the historical images manifested by material objects made philosophical ideas visible. In this context, such seemingly innocuous objects, like clocks or dolls, take on profound significance in so far as they represent specific genealogical strands that constitute not only the historical project of modernity but also its philosophical expression. Yet the truth made present by montage is only discernible for but an instant: “The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”52 In montage, Benjamin was not necessarily looking for a synthetic, neat connection between philosophy and history but instead a productive, dialectical tension that revealed flashes of historical truth about modernity while destabilizing them at the same time. These flashes, he supposed, could be best elicited through the juxtapositions of objects – commodities – presented under the arcades of Paris in the early-twentieth century. Similarly, this book attempts to illuminate destination Italy by juxtaposing its salient texts, histories, and spaces. It privileges the fragments of guidebooks, the snapshots of postcards, and the metonyms of souvenirs. It calls attention to the ways that such an approach can also enrich the study of tourism. The field of tourism studies has been divided, for the most part, into two research camps. The majority of the current scholarship is concerned with hospitality management and tourism’s potential for economic development. A smaller body of research considers the phenomenon of tourism as one of the paramount expressions of the selfsame project of modernity that concerned Benjamin.53 This research explores the ways that tourism has changed the perceptions of time and space and the representations of reality, as well as the modes of sociality and generally being in the world. The use of montage has the potential to reveal (and also trouble) the ways that tourism as a discourse contributes to a modernity (and postmodernity) at large. By engaging montage as a method, this book juxtaposes texts, practices, and spaces to open up moments of dialectical dissonance. In this sense, it offers not a synthetic reconciliation of textual images, material objects, and postmodern geographies but rather the opportunity to explore what emerges from the interstitial spaces between destination Italy and the modern Italian state. At the same time, the method of montage provides a way to both engage and amplify the fragmentation intrinsic to the postmodern condition. It is a way to turn the post­ modern on itself in order to interrogate the touristic imaginaries it entrains. From this view, montage reveals destination Italy to be a rather

22  The Beautiful Country

coherent entity composed of stereotypes and superficies. It is a oneway street into the presentation of the un-presentable, that is, a way to think through the experience of the world in fragments, to make palpably visual the postmodern condition, and, ultimately, to make sense of destination Italy.54 It is the intention of this book to negotiate both senses of montage and, in so doing, to demonstrate the ways that destination Italy shifts and shapes the unstable terrains of the postmodern. What is more, destination Italy not only marks the patina of tradition and authenticity that aims to assuage the anxieties linked to globalization but also draws attention to the structures of control linked to the ideology of neoliberalism that subtends all. They disguise one’s subjection to a globalized culture industry as the touristic mastery of an attraction, a city, or even a country. They sustain a “tourist bubble” that segregates cities into touristic spaces and all others.55 They funnel profits into the wealthy corporations that own hotel chains and tour companies to the detriment of their low-paid service workers and the governments of many host countries across the developing world. In tourism, subjugation always comes with a smile. Destination Italy is meant to palliate this unease, and it therefore raises important questions about our contemporary moment. How do we throw off the inequitable yoke of neoliberalism, which claims tourism as one of its most profitable and widespread industries? Is it possible to resist the insidious structures of its control and, if so, how? What ideas about Italy might this involve? Perhaps the hyperreal constellation of attractions that constitute destination Italy suggests a point of entry. Without a doubt, this constellation gives rise to new ways of imagining Italy as both nation and destination and to new understandings of tourism through the operations of simulation and the discourse of the postmodern. Yet it is also possible that this hyperreal constellation might just offer us a flashpoint of resistance. An Itinerary The following book is divided into three sections: “Texts,” “Practices,” and “Spaces.” The first section, “Texts,” examines the relationship between the ideological operations of the tourist guidebook and its publication histories in the context of destination Italy. Edward Said writes that the guidebook is a type of text that people fall back on when faced with the uncertainties of travel.56 He adds that they also depend on a delicate balance of supply and demand between tourist-reader and

Introduction 23

guidebook writer in that each one sustains the expectations of the other and vice versa. For example, tourist-readers would anticipate a description of the Colosseum in any guidebook about Rome, and guidebook writers, happy to oblige, pen entries to meet those expectations. With each successive edition, the guidebook’s expertise about a particular destination grows. Tourist-readers cede to its authority and put into practice the very reality the text appears to describe. As such, there occurs a “preposterous transition” from text to practice. Words magically leap off the page and imbricate themselves as practices of everyday life. In doing so, imaginaries like the Orient or destination Italy come into existence, and ideologies like Orientalism or neoliberalism succeed as systems of thought.57 Chapter 1, “Codes of Travel: Italy’s Guidebook Tradition,” traces the long history of guidebooks to Italy, which in many ways is the history of the guidebook itself as it developed in Western civilization. It begins with the itineraries and inventories of the classical world, then considers Christian pilgrimage manuals of the early modern period, and the guidebooks of the Grand Tour, and ends with the mass publication of guidebooks that was inaugurated by John Murray and Karl Baedeker in the mid-nineteenth century. This first chapter shows that the publication history of the tourist guidebook was critical to the construction of destination Italy as a touristic imaginary. Chapter 2, “Italian Montage: On Rhetoric and Representations,” explores the ways in which guidebooks frame destination Italy as a land of leisure and, specifically, how the tropes of il dolce far niente (the sweet art of idleness), la dolce vita (the sweet life), and il bel paese (the beautiful country) mark it as a space of leisure and aesthetics. In addition to the guidebook, another one of tourism’s most popular commodities, the postcard, calls attention to the modes of vision associated with touristic representation and, in particular, how these objects have commodified the Italian tradition of vedutismo (landscape painting) for the growing tourist masses. The book’s second section, “Practices,” compares the salient moments of destination Italy’s history with those of the Italian nation state, focusing attention on the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. It situates the development of Italy’s international and domestic tourism industries within the familiar trajectories of modern Italian history such as the Risorgimento, the rise of Fascism, and the post-war economic miracle. The chapters in this section emphasize the technological advances that have shaped tourist practices in Italy and industrial modernization generally in Europe and North America. They reveal

24  The Beautiful Country

how the technologies like automobiles and jumbo jets organized different types of infrastructure for specific tourist demographics in Italy. For example, beachside holiday villages (villaggi turistici) appealed to a growing middle class of car-owning Italians in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas low-cost airlines like RyanAir and EasyJet target foreign tourists from the United Kingdom and northern Europe for short-term city breaks in the early twenty-first century. While the relationship between domestic and international tourism in Italy has remained subjacent to more recognized histories of modern Italy, these chapters show that it has been equally formative of the Italian state. Chapter 3, “Destination Nation: The Grand Tour, Thomas Cook, and the Arrival of Mass Tourism,” deals primarily with the arrival of mass tourism to Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, it explores the central role played by the British tour operator Thomas Cook, which ordained Italy as a prime destination for the growing tourist masses. This chapter also demonstrates how destination Italy and the Italian nation state converged at this historical moment, just as the latter was struggling to gain its political and economic footing in the decades after Unification. Chapter 4, “Tours of Duty: Touring Clubs, Fascist Agencies, and the Domestic Tourism Industry,” shows the way in which Italians in the early-twentieth century appropriated the touring practices of Cook and others to foster a sense of national belonging through the development of a domestic tourism industry. Respectively, the Touring Club Italiano and the Fascist regime had similar aims to “far conoscere l’Italia agli italiani” (to make Italy known to Italians) through travel, even though the latter insisted on cleansing destination Italy of any attributes that it considered incongruent with Fascism. Chapter 5, ­ “Masses in Transit: The New Economy of Tourism in the Twentieth Cen­ tury,” scrutinizes the new modes of consumption and transportation that homogenized the touring practices of Italians and foreigners in the decades following the Second World War. As a result, destination Italy transformed into a pre-packaged holiday space that emerged as a model for standardizing the experiences of mass tourism in the mid- to latetwentieth century. In this age of late capitalism, however, touristic practices have become increasingly fragmented, and what were once month-long, package vacations are now weekend getaways on lowcost airlines. This marked acceleration and compression of holidays likewise impresses destination Italy firmly into the unsettled realm of the postmodern.

Introduction 25

The book’s final section, “Spaces,” explores the simulacra of destination Italy and their relationship to globalization, the postmodern, and the Italian nation state. With innumerable visitors and worldwide reach, these copies have become the primary loci in which Italy is both experienced and understood today. They promote the fantasy of Italy as a repository of tradition and authenticity, as something real in the face of the “flat world” of the twenty-first century.58 All that is solid does not melt into air. Here, the fake becomes just as significant as the real for imagining modern Italy, perhaps even more so. In this context it becomes logical for Roman performers to simulate historical Romans for a Roman audience at Rainbow Magic Land. The lines between real and fake are now so blurred that they have become indistinct, and simulacra have become interchangeable with nation and destination. Chapter 6, “Italy without Borders: Simulacra, Simulation, and the Postmodern Grand Tour,” analyses the large-scale simulacra of Italy constructed outside the borders of the Italian state in four quintessentially postmodern sites: (1) Las Vegas (the Venetian Hotel and Casino); (2),  Disneyland (Mediterranean Harbor at the Tokyo DisneySea); (3)  Dubai (the Mercato shopping mall); and (4) suburbia (Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, a luxury housing development in northern California). These are all expressions of a globalized Italy without Italians and of the symbolic triumph of copy over original. Moreover, each simulacrum engages techniques of social control, from bodily disorientation to direct surveillance, which are disavowed by the notions of authenticity and tradition signified by destination Italy. Chapter 7, “Postmodern Passages: Souvenirs, Theme Parks, Outlet Malls, and the Body of the Simulated Nation,” focuses attention on the simulacra of a reduced scale localized within the borders of the Italian state – souvenirs representing former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Italia in miniatura (Italy in miniature) theme park, and the Valdichiana Outlet Village shopping mall. This is the domestic order of Italian hyperreality. A fake Italy built in Italy. A fake Tuscan village built in Tuscany. Like their cognates elsewhere, these simulacra exercise techniques of social control. They control bodies and gazes, yes, but they also ultimately transform the imaginary of destination Italy by making it an Other unto itself. As a whole, destination Italy once again exists as many things – a powerful touristic imaginary, a counterpart to the Italian state, an expression of the postmodern, a hyperreal order, and a spurious reprieve from globalization. It is this last iteration that troubles most in that Italy,

26  The Beautiful Country

now inextricably linked to mass tourism, becomes inserted into the current projects of neoliberalism.59 Again, there is a triviality accorded to the study of tourism, despite its status as one of the world’s most powerful and potentially destructive industries. This perception of frivolousness conceals the current ideological dominance of neoliberalism over apparatuses like the Italian state. It also stymies the scrupulous examination of ideological operations in the present day and, specifically, of how and why subjection is all the more lasting when it comes with a smile, as it always does in tourism. It is the aspiration of this book, then, to shed light on the forms of control and discrimination hidden beneath the leisurely patina of tourism. Illuminated as such, new mechanisms of resistance could materialize through these understandings of destination Italy, which just might have the potential to restore real agency to real subjects. Exactly how one arrives at the possibility for resistance and transformation is a long and storied journey that now begins in the following chapters.

Texts

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1 Codes of Travel: Italy’s Guidebook Tradition

Rome comes awake slowly on an early June morning. The sun is low, not yet at its blazing zenith, and the cobblestoned streets are still cool and empty from the night. The air is limpid, just a pale tint of blue visible beyond the eaves and baroque spires of the city centre. The steam hiss of espresso machines and the soft clinking of demitasses signal the daily passage into consciousness. An august Roman gentleman ruffles his newspaper outside a café, his slow turning of pages marking the time along with the nearby church bells. Another young man, clearly still half-asleep, arrives on a moped with a box of freshly baked cornetti. He drops them off at the café with little fanfare and speeds off down the street. There are a few pigeons shambling about, but it is a flock of a different sort at whom that the delivery man shouts “Aò!” in exasperation and swerves to avoid; it is a flock of tourists. The tourist crowds begin to swell around the city’s most popular attractions just as the day reaches its full swelter. They swarm around the Colosseum and Saint Peter’s Basilica, often queuing for hours to spend mere minutes inside each. They footslog through the Roman Forum, following tour guides around like torpid lemmings. The Sistine Chapel is always a traffic jam. They besiege the Trevi Fountain in order to toss a coin that will ensure their return trips to Rome. In fact, so many tourists believe in this superstition that in the first six months of 2012 the municipal government collected €540,000 in coins from the fountain, or approximately €3,000 a day.1 Each tourist carries, without fail, some form of camera, be it a smartphone, an iPad or a behemoth single-lens reflex. They are standard issue for the tourist uniform. In addition to cameras, such attire usually consists of wrinkle-proof clothing, comfortable shoes, hat, bag, water

30  The Beautiful Country

bottle, map, and guidebook. The latter is often kept at the ready in a bag or pocket, or in one’s hand, with fingers marking the pages deemed important. The tourist usually reads guidebooks in situ, eyes darting back and forth between text and monument, gathering a sense of place through the prism of words. Sometimes she reads them during moments of rest, say, sitting on a wall beside the Pantheon or at a café near Piazza Navona. Tourists pore over these texts to plan their next sightseeing moves. They read descriptions out loud to one another. They confirm routes and locations. Sometimes they debate the text’s advice, not entirely trusting the information and itineraries set forth within. Still others do not open the guidebook at all but rather carry the weighty tome around like a textual security blanket. Instead of helping these tourists to become more independent, the guidebook does just the opposite of what it claims; in a magisterial move of textual power the guidebook makes itself indispensable. In fact, some tourists develop such a tenacious dependency on guidebooks that they feel “lost” without them, as in the case of Lucy Honeychurch, the protagonist of E.M. Forster’s famous novel A Room with a View (1908). Lucy grew anxious and emotional without her Baedeker while lost in the Florentine church of Santa Croce: “Tears of indignation came to Lucy’s eyes partly because Miss Lavish had jilted her, partly because she had taken her Baedeker.”2 What Lucy Honey­ church feared most was the lack of instruction, either from a fellow tourist, Miss Lavish, or the guidebook, which she trusted to tell her what to see and how to act. Indeed, instructional texts for travellers – from cosmographies, itineraries, and pilgrimage manuals of the past to the mass-produced guidebooks of the present day – not only mediated travellers’ experiences of destination Italy but also represented it as a coherent imaginary well before Italy became a unified political state. While emperors, pilgrims, merchants, and Grand Tourists alike helped to construct this image over centuries, it was the guidebook that codified Italy as a foremost travel destination and, in particular, as the prime objective of the mass tourism revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. This chapter explores the history of guidebooks to destination Italy, whereas the following chapter investigates the travel knowledge that these texts produce about it.3 Collectively, the two chapters sketch out a  textual genealogy that gives rise to Italy as a paramount touristic imaginary and lays the groundwork for actual touring practices there. To wit, the guidebook is the best-suited publication to set into relief

Codes of Travel  31

the touristic stereotypes that frame Italy as a land of leisure. In content, it uses stereotypes (along with other rhetorical devices) to present destination Italy as a singular, synthetic construction and, in so doing, provides a converse to the tenuous, contradictory reality of the Italian nation state. In form, the guidebook is a quintessentially postmodern text. This postmodern impulse is made evident by ever-changing hotel listings, restaurant recommendations, monument descriptions, et cetera – all insignificant notations that attempt to put forward the unpresentable in presentation, that is, the existence of destination Italy as a real, cohesive, intelligible whole.4 For example, the 2007 edition of Italy for Dummies treats Italy as something that can be “done” in mere months: “With a history stretching from the dawn of time and artwork to match, Italy definitely offers too much to see in one trip, unless you’re planning a six-month-long visit.”5 It is a whole world of art, cuisine, ruins, fashion, soccer, wine, and more at the tourist ready. Italy for Dummies, like any guidebook, comprises visual and verbal fragments – a short paragraph about the Colosseum here, a glossy photo of Campo de’ Fiori there. Little is treated with any depth. The guidebook figuratively segments Italy by superficies in such a way that mirrors similar operations performed by postmodern architecture.6 Just as the Westin Bonaventure Hotel (classic postmodern edifice that it is) disorients the body in time and space, the guidebook disorients its tourist-readers with its disjointed structure and overwhelming amounts of information. In such ways these texts (more montage than narrative) achieve the opposite of what they appear to do – they confuse instead of orientate. Moreover, the same edition of Italy for Dummies attempts to negate its role in such confusion by distancing itself from other guidebooks: “Unlike some travel guides that read more like a phonebook-style-­ directory listing everything and anything, this book cuts to the chase.”7 Ironically the text has myriad lists and descriptions that do indeed read just like a directory, adding that its tourist-readers do not have to “read the whole thing from page one, but can open it at any point and delve into the subject at hand.”8 Compared to the genre of travel writing, which often eloquently captures the spirit of a foreign place, guidebooks like Italy for Dummies are more concerned with pragmatics.9 By suggesting where to go and what to see, these texts acquire the ability to mediate the behaviour of tourists in situ. They delimit spatial boundaries and designate the ways to experience place. What is interesting in the case of destination Italy is the way that the guidebook disavows the

32  The Beautiful Country

fundamentally postmodern disposition of the Italian state by emphasizing the congruity of place. It focuses instead on the stereotypes and the superficies, which are signified through textual operations that have been perfected over centuries. That tradition, like this chapter, begins with the itineraries and inventories of the classical world, particularly those noted by the Greek writer under the Roman Empire, Pausanias. His ten-volume Description of Greece, written between 146 and 175, was the first to describe and validate sites based on his personal experiences as a traveller. Pilgrimage manuals of the early modern period comprise the next step in the guidebook’s evolution in Western Europe, one of the most important being the twelfth-century Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Marvels of Rome), which privileged Rome’s Christian and classical heritage by highlighting its religious and secular sites. During the Grand Tour, guidebooks assumed a more didactic role. They determined the manners in which tourists were to observe, collect, and consume beauty in various forms (that is, art, landscape, ruins), and, in so doing, these texts became arbiters of social taste.10 At the advent of mass tourism in the mid-­nineteenth century the guidebook was already well established not only as a literary genre but also as an indispensable instrument of touristic practice. Publication grew exponentially, and by the late-nineteenth century, when tens of thousands of tourists were sightseeing in Italy, they all had Murray’s and Baedeker’s guides firmly in hand. This textual genealogy thus brings into relief the ways in which guidebooks and destination Italy mutually constituted one another over time, and, in turn, how the tropes generated about Italy in guidebooks influenced the practices of mass tourism still to come. Pausanias, Baedeker of an Ancient Age The origins of the modern guidebook can be traced to the classical Mediterranean. In his extensive history of the genre Nicholas Parsons shows the way it derived from a combination of fantastic geography (that is, Homer, Ptolemy, Strabo), encyclopedic cataloguing (Pliny the Elder), numerical measurements (Dicaearchus), the invention of wonders and marvels (Herodotus, Varro), and the classical tradition of the Periodos ges (Tour round the world).11 This corpus of ancient texts is important for it established a hierarchy of destinations – for instance, the Seven Wonders of the World – that was determined by verifi­ able  data and approached with quasi-scientific detachment. Indeed,

Codes of Travel  33

verifiability and neutral objectivity would later prove, according to Parsons, the two defining textual characteristics of the modern guidebook as genre. Pausanias is often thought to be the originator of the genre or, as Parsons puts it, the “Baedeker of the ancient world.” Often nicknamed “The Periegete” or simply “The Guide,” Pausanias wrote the ten-­volume Περιηγησις Ελλαδος, or Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece), most likely between 146 and 175.12 He hailed from Magnesia in Roman-ruled Asia Minor (near Izmir in present-day Turkey), yet his writings celebrated Greece – a testament to the fluidity of cultural and geographical boundaries in the ancient Mediterranean. Pausanias’s writings had two goals: to provide a reliable guide for travellers and to produce a work of literature.13 In both respects he missed the mark, and his work remained unknown until it was rediscovered by scholars in the nineteenth century, in particular anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer. While academics have argued over specifics regarding the intellectual milieu and literary tradition (periegesis) of Pausanias’s writings, Frazer’s original assessment still rings true: that Pausanias intended his Description of Greece to serve as a guidebook for  travellers, “the ancient equivalent of our modern Murrays and Baedekers.”14 Travellers were to follow Pausanias’s itineraries point for point to experience a comprehensive tour of mainland Greece. Itineraries were quite common in the Roman Empire, the most well known being the Antonii Augusti Itinerarium Provinciarum. Published in the late-second or early-third century, the Itinerarium Antonini (as it is more commonly known) gave detailed lists of Rome’s imperial holdings and labelled them, alternately, as cosmographies, geographies, or itineraries. The Itinerarium Antonini divided the empire into regions found between the Levant and Britain and fastidiously listed all place names and distances.15 While the text might be based on Emperor Caracalla’s travels circa 211–17, it is more likely a palimpsest of various sources, including previous imperial surveys.16 On the contrary, Pausanias’s text engages with landscape in an unprecedented way. Instead of simply listing names and distances as did the Itinerarium Antonini, the text embellishes the landscape with digressions on myth and folklore to create a set of narratives that could be understood and shared across Greece. Pausanias consciously paired sights (theôrêmata) with stories (logoi) based on his own experience (autopsia).17 As Jas’ Elsner writes, “Pausanias’s work reflects a deep and ongoing process of wrestling with a transcription that would both evoke

34  The Beautiful Country

his Greece as a set of ideals in literary form and preserve the geographic particularity of the topography he walked through.”18 For Pausanias, then, the act of travel transformed landscape into a discourse that subtended the imagining of Greek identity in the Second Sophistic. What is most interesting about Pausanias’s text is that it anticipates the linkage between tourism and pilgrimage. The scholarship on the Description of Greece situates the text within the pilgrimage culture of the Antonine age, and it debates whether Pausanias was himself a pilgrim and/or writing for an audience of pilgrims.19 In Pausanias’s time, pilgrimage was often a voyage undertaken on behalf of the city state (polis) to Panhellenic festivals (panegyris), state pilgrimage (theoria), and healing sanctuaries, sometimes as far away as Greco-Roman Egypt. As the Description of Greece devotes many pages to spiritual centres, and the elements of sacred vision and intellectual contemplation associated therewith, Ian Rutherford argues that Pausanias’s text is rooted in the tradition of Greek pilgrimage literature. He qualifies this, however, by saying there is no conclusive proof that Pausanias himself, or his intended audience, was a religious pilgrim: “as it is, [Pausanias] seems more like a tourist than a pilgrim.”20 Yet it is erroneous to call Pausanias a tourist, for tourism is a phenomenon of the modern age, born of the alienation and ennui linked to the Industrial Revolution. He might be better thought of as a secular pilgrim in a pre-modern context, whose proto-guidebook anticipated a much more extensive (and Christian) pilgrimage tradition to come: the path to Rome.21 Pilgrims and Marvels: Rome In the four centuries after the end of the Roman Empire circa 476, the Italian peninsula experienced a series of barbarian invasions, the rise of city states, the ascendancy of Byzantium to the east, a burgeoning but fractured papacy, and Charlemagne’s declaration of the Holy Roman Empire.22 Despite this political and economic instability Rome reemerged as a destination for both religious and secular pilgrimage by the early-ninth century. It competed with Constantinople to become the centre of the Christian faith, a role that it eventually won. The papacy filled the power vacuum left by imperial decline and championed the city’s divine ordination as the site of Saint Peter’s church, thus branding the city as the wellspring of Christianity itself.23 In this historical moment Rome emerged as a centre of religious pilgrimage. It was considered one of the three most significant destinations

Codes of Travel  35

(peregrinationes maiores) for medieval pilgrims in Europe, the others being Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela.24 By the twelfth century the city had become so important and its pilgrims so numerous that they acquired a name of their own: the Romipetae (Rome seekers).25 Secular pilgrimage to Rome developed in parallel with religious travel and coincided with a growing interest in antiquarianism, particularly the aesthetic and architectural inheritance of the Roman Empire. Ruins like the Aurelian walls, and monuments like the Colosseum, were admired by travellers and pilgrims alike. Common travel practices in medieval Rome combined religious and secular pilgrimage – Christian churches and imperial ruins were equally valued attractions – and pilgrims’ manuals reflected these connections accordingly. For example, the Einsiedeln Itinerary, commonly referred to as the Einsidlensis, was one of the earliest proto-guidebook texts to combine classical and Christian elements. It was, as Richard Krautheimer puts it, “an introductory anthology that recorded inscriptions impartially, whether pagan or Christian, secular or ecclesiastical, while the itineraries through the city … list indiscriminately Christian and ancient monuments as they present themselves to the visitor.”26 Written in the late-eighth or early-ninth century, the Einsidlensis mapped out eleven routes for the pilgrim traveller, each including a mix of religious and secular monuments to visit. The first route, for instance, traced a path in Rome that began near Castel Sant’Angelo, passed through the Circus Flaminius and the church of San Lorenzo in Damascus, then Trajan’s forum and column, to Saint Peter in Chains, and on to Trajan’s baths. This mix of attractions spanning the religious and the secular (for example, churches, baths, forums, and theatres) spoke to the text’s inclination towards a readership of Christian pilgrims who also maintained interests in the antiquarian age. Typically the sorts of proto-guidebook compilations that emerged at this moment were called Mirabilia (Mar­ vels), and they profiled sites that appealed to both the Christian pilgrim’s religious devotion and the antiquarian’s scholarly interests in the classical world.27 Mirabilia Urbis Romae The most famous of these Mirabilia appeared two centuries later. It was a pilgrimage manual called the Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Marvels of Rome) that quickly gained traction as the most prominent proto-guidebook to combine religious and secular attractions in circulation.28 The Mirabilia

36  The Beautiful Country

Urbis Romae, similar to the Einsidlensis, codified pilgrim’s routes in Rome that were integrated with non-religious sites. It was written around 1143, most likely by a canon of Saint Peter’s, in the rhetorical tradition of the descriptiones urbium and laudationes urbium, or, respectively, the systematic lists and praises of ancient buildings.29 The text opens with the legendary founding of Rome, with its warring tribes, pagan gods, and requisite fratricide.30 It describes the walls, gates, arches, hills, baths, palaces, and other monuments, including churches and places of Christian martyrdom. The third part of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae outlines a perambulation across the city or an archaeological promenade from the Vatican to the Forum, across the Aventine, and ending in Trastevere. Similar to the site sacralization of modern tourist attractions, the Mirabilia Urbis Romae named, framed, elevated, and enshrined the sites of Rome.31 Many of the sites described by the text – such as the Vatican, Castel Sant’Angelo, the Forum, Circus Maximus, and Trastevere – remain obligatory sights for present-day tourists to the city. The Mirabilia Urbis Romae fused religious and secular elements to such an extent that it has been described as “a sort of ­palimpsest with one civilization written over the other, or perhaps a tapestry with the two stitched together,” wherein “the Christian city appears superimposed on the world of ancient Rome.”32 Since the text dwelled on ancient monuments, some scholars argue that the Mirabilia Urbis Romae was not meant to be a pilgrimage manual at all. Nine Miedema writes that most Romipetae of that era would have feared Rome’s pagan buildings because they were associated with witchcraft and sorcery.33 Instead, pilgrims would have been more interested in catacombs and churches, she argues, with proof that the descriptions of these Christian sites did, in fact, outnumber the descriptions of antiquity. Yet in 1192 the Mirabilia Urbis Romae was inserted into the Liber Censuum, the official papal register of institutions, cities, and territories that paid dues to the Holy See. This inclusion implies that the text’s admiration for the monuments of pagan antiquity did not threaten the “true faith” of Christianity.34 Instead, the commingling of the religious and the secular represented by the Mirabilia Urbis Romae revealed a shifting attitude towards antiquity wherein the classical world blended into Christian tradition – a clear prefiguration of the Renaissance to come. The staying power of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, too, was exceptional. It survived more or less in the same form for more than six centuries, save for a few added illustrations and expanded descriptions. It was copied, translated, and republished innumerable times, first as a

Codes of Travel  37

manuscript and then as a printed book, throughout Germany, France, England, and Italy. Illustrated versions were produced as early as the thirteenth century, and by 1450 the Mirabilia Urbis Romae was considered to be among the leading authoritative texts on Roman antiquity.35 By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries young aristocrats embarking on the Grand Tour faithfully carried editions of the Mirabilia Urbis Romae with them to Italy, and, thanks to these Grand Tourists, the guidebook as genre evolved once more. Instructions for travellers began to accompany these texts, and destination Italy emerged as both a zone of questionable morality and a symbolic geography for the acquisition of taste and the accumulation of social capital. Grand Tour Guides Centuries after the Mirabilia Urbis Romae was first published there were thousands of young, male, and predominantly British aristocrats – Grand Tourists – arriving in Italy during the mid- to late-eighteenth century to complete their aesthetic education. These were not religious pilgrims but rather secular ones who sought beauty in the ruins, art, and landscape of the Italian peninsula during the age of Enlightenment. These tourists’ sensory engagement with works of art and antiquity was believed to impart them with taste and knowledge. Guidebooks responded to this new aesthetic orientation, as well as the Grand Tour’s broader educative function, by assuming a more didactic attitude. As Parsons notes, “the rise of the bourgeois guidebook may perhaps be traced to the difficulty that most people experienced in making such decisions and the relief they felt when the guidebook authoritatively made the choices for them.”36 By making these decisions, the guidebooks of the Grand Tour did not just determine the sites for tourists to see but also schooled them in the art of travel. Ars apodemica, Learning to and from Travel The pragmatics of the Grand Tour can be traced back to the humanist tradition of the ars apodemica (“the art of being away from home”; also translated as “the art of travel”).37 Put another way, the ars apodemica denotes a corpus of texts that provided formal instruction in the way to travel. They codified travel methodologies that underpinned the broader organization of empirical and non-empirical knowledge in Western Europe.38 Broadly, these texts established a deductive system

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of knowledge that moved from the general to the particular. They also encouraged an individual’s search for knowledge, reflecting an affinity with the Protestant belief that “access to the kingdom of heaven was open to everybody individually, not mediated through the Church, but through Christ.”39 With the ars apodemica, institutions like the church no longer controlled access to knowledge; instead, knowledge was created through the experience of travel. On the Grand Tour, such travel experiences were shaped by travelling tutors (or “bear-leaders”) and trusted guidebooks. Often, the tutor took responsibility for the Grand Tourist’s spiritual and moral education, whereas the guidebook was charged with his aesthetic and cultural one. While the mid- to late-eighteenth century marked the apex of Grand Tour guidebook production, guides for most major Italian towns were already in circulation by 1660.40 Indeed, the most popular guidebooks of the Grand Tour would not have been possible without their seventeenth-century antecedents, which experimented with the formulae and formats of the genre. Among these predecessors were François Schott’s Itinerarium Italiae (1601), a largely plagiarized compilation that was published in a jubilee year and became a bestseller; James Howell’s Instructions for Forreine Travell (1642), a didactic text par excellence; John Raymond’s Mercurio Italiano (1648), among the first to frame Italy as the fount of Western civilization; Andrew Balfour’s Letters to a Friend, Containing Excellent Directions and Advices for Travel through France and Italy (1679), which emphasized the gentlemanly comportment of the traveller; and François Maximilien Misson’s Nouveau Voyage d’Italie (1691), a vacillation between praise for Italian art and excoriation of Roman Catholicism. One of the most well-known predecessors was the guide written by Richard Lassels, a Catholic priest from England who visited Italy numerous times between 1637 and 1668.41 He wrote at least five accounts of his visits, which were compiled and published posthumously under the title of Voyage of Italy (1670). Lassels is often credited as the man who coined the phrase Grand Tour, with his text being the first true guidebook in the English language.42 The book itself was pocket sized (6.5 inches by 4 inches) and meant for use by tourists in situ. Unlike the epistolary guides of Balfour or Misson, Lassels organized, highlighted, and indexed all 672 pages of his Voyage so that travellers could easily access its practical information and itineraries.43 He also included an extensive preface on the edifying value of travel, which reflected the guidebook’s new-found didactics and mounted a defence against the critiques that were levied at travel as a mode of education.44

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Grand Tour Bestsellers The vociferous critiques lobbied against travel in the eighteenth century did nothing to stem the flow of Grand Tourists headed to Italy, or the resulting production of guidebooks. Some of the better-known volumes included Johann Georg Keysler’s Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain: Giving a True and Just Description of the Present State of Those Countries (1740); Joseph-Jérôme de Lalande’s Voyage d’un François en Italie, fait dans les années 1765 et 1766; Giuseppe Vasi’s Itinerario istruttivo per trovare con facilità tutte le magnificenze di Roma (1763); and Thomas Martyn’s The Gentleman’s Guide (1789).45 The two most popular, in English and German respectively, were also the ones with the longest publication histories: Thomas Nugent’s Grand Tour (1749) and Johann Jacob Volkmann’s Historisch-kritische Nachrichten von Italien (Historical-Critical News from Italy; 1770). Nugent’s text was one of the most notable guidebooks of the eighteenth century published in English.46 It was printed in a duodecimo format and filled with practical advice about travelling in Italy. The text’s didactic attitude was clear on almost every page. For instance, it warned travellers “never to take out their money or valuables in front of strange company because of the great many robberies and murders [that] were committed on such passengers.”47 Likewise, the text gave advice on prices and customs and on things as varied as horses at assorted cambiature (trading posts) or even Venetian courtesans (“Here the gentlemen are at liberty to rally and address the ladies, but must take care to keep within the bounds of decency, lest they meet with bravoes or assassins”).48 While Nugent’s text included descriptions of art and ancient monuments, it was the explicitly practical advice and portable format that rendered it one of the standard English-language guidebooks of the Grand Tour. In Germany, Johann Jacob Volkmann’s Historisch-kritische Nachrichten von Italien became a popular guidebook for German-speaking Grand Tourists.49 No doubt its fame spread thanks to Goethe’s praise of it on his Italian journey.50 The Nachrichten differed from its English-language counterparts in several respects. First, instead of condemning the Roman Catholic Church, it treated religious matters as historical phenomena in  order to contextualize aesthetic descriptions of art and artefacts. Volkmann writes, “Man sagt, der Historienschreiber müsse weder Vaterland noch Religion haben; mit eben dem Rechte kann man es von einem Reisebeschreiber sodern” (It is said that the historian should have neither fatherland nor religion; it is equally justified to demand

40  The Beautiful Country

the same of a travel writer).51 By adopting a neutral position, the text presented objective judgments as to what ought to be seen. Indeed, this is what the Nachrichten did; it delineated attractions conducive to the formation of taste from those that were not. By establishing a hierarchy of attractions, the guidebook aestheticized not only destination Italy but also the ways in which Grand Tourists observed, collected, and consumed beauty in various forms (that is, art, landscape, ruins). What is more, the Nachrichten combined the culture of the word (“Kultur des Wortes”) with the culture of the senses (“Kultur des Sinnes”), and, according to Parsons, this implied that truth could be found within the text as well as in the sensory experiences evoked by it (such as looking at art and listening to music).52 Italy became the locus of both these Kulturen during the Grand Tour, and, as a result, guidebooks like Volkmann’s transformed the aesthetic experience of Italy as destination into a sort of secular religion. Grand Tourists often wanted material proof of their sensual and instructive Italian journeys and would collect material objects that marked those experiences. These consumptive impulses gave rise to a fast-growing market of souvenirs during the Grand Tour. Sarah Benson has documented this phenomenon well, particularly in relation to Rome. At this moment, she writes, there was a “symbiotic development of Rome as a cultural destination and the development of souvenir genres and formats in general … Souvenirs of Rome fit into a pattern of the rising prominence of vision in gathering, recording and disseminating knowledge that took place across a wide variety of disciplines.”53 Among the more popular keepsakes were the printed copies of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous etchings, Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome). It was also common for Grand Tourists to commission paintings either from a specialized artist or in a particular style. For instance, a tourist might hire a specialist of the Campania landscape like Giovanni Battista Lusieri to paint the Bay of Naples, or he might pay Giovanni Paolo Pannini for a capriccio, a type of painting that fantastically combined unrelated buildings, ruins, and other architectural elements. Bolstered by the burgeoning traffic in souvenirs, Grand Tour guidebooks increasingly correlated the aesthetic experience of Italy with the practices of collecting, and they offered more information accordingly.54 In turn, souvenirs and these growing arts of collection necessitated a new guidebook semiotics that reflected these changing aesthetic tastes, one that first appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century among the pages of Mariana Starke’s Letters from Italy and her later Travels on the Continent.

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A New Semiotics In the waning years of the Grand Tour, British author Mariana Starke published a series of guidebooks – Letters from Italy (1800), Travels on the Continent (1820), and Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent of Europe (1829) – which inaugurated a new textual system for representing and ordering the hierarchy of attractions in destination Italy. These texts codified a new semiotics of tourism. Specifically, they used exclamation points to signify an attraction’s value. For example, the description of the Santissima Annunziata church in Florence reads: “In a Corridor on the left side of the church is the celebrated fresco, called La Madonna del Sacco!!!”55 The three exclamation points emphatically underscore the fresco’s value to the tourist. According to Parsons, this attempt to classify works of art by way of exclamation points “established [Starke] as the forerunner of the bourgeois-oriented products that were to make both Murray and Baedeker household names.”56 Starke’s works standardized the practice of grading sights, and her exclamation points clearly established the precedent for Baedeker’s famed star system. Furthermore, Starke’s guidebooks enjoyed great success in the earlynineteenth century, with Travels on the Continent reaching its eighth edition by 1832 (their collective attention focused on Italy). By condensing artistic descriptions and logistical information into one volume, Starke’s texts obviated the need for travellers to carry multiple publications while on tour. In addition to the exclamation points, Starke funda­ mentally restructured the guidebook with her use of the unprecedented Geheimtipp, or “insider’s tip.” This insider knowledge was meant to enhance the tourist’s sensory and aesthetic experiences of Italy (that is, by pointing out better vantage points, et cetera), and at the same time the Geheimtipp reinforced her guidebook’s textual authority by claiming to provide insights that its competitors could not. On the subject of authority, Starke was clearly an unusual figure of the era, being a woman, a writer, and an intrepid traveller. Her guidebooks are the earliest examples of the genre penned by a female author, even though other travel narratives, such as those written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or Hester Piozzi, were in circulation at the time.57 In the male-dominated world of the Grand Tour, Starke cut a figure of ambiguous sexuality, dressing in a tall hat and a riding habit and often going by the name of Jack Starke.58 Avowedly single, she lived on her own in Italy for six years and spent the last decades of her life revising

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her guidebooks. The question of whether Starke’s energetic performance of masculinity definitively contributed to her textual authority and possibly to the commercial success of her texts remains unanswered; however, one might surmise that, in the masculine world of the Grand Tour, her transgression of gender roles through self-virilization might have allowed her opportunities like independent travel and selfemployment that led to achievements otherwise reserved for men. What is clear about Starke’s corpus of guidebooks – with their exclamation points, Geheimtipps, and multiple editions – is that they revolutionized the genre. Her texts presaged the Baedeker star system and the mass production of guidebooks that became the norm by the mid-­ nineteenth century. Indeed, Karl Baedeker, along with his English counterpart, John Murray, transformed the guidebook genre once again with simple red handbooks that contained a more complex set of touristic signifiers within their pages. It was no coincidence that Mariana Starke’s fifth edition of Travels on the Continent (1824) was published by the very same Murray who, only twelve years later, would standardize the evaluation of sightseeing attractions and assume an even more didactic attitude towards the middle-class tourists who had by now replaced the aristocratic travellers of the Grand Tour. Vade Mecums for the Masses John Murray first published his Handbook for Travellers on the Continent in 1836, and Karl Baedeker’s Handbuch für Reisende (Handbook for travellers) appeared on the market a few years later in 1839. Both were aimed at a middle-class readership, the fastest-growing demographic of tourists in Europe during the era of post-Napoleonic reconstruction. These guidebooks were portable and popular, identifiable by their red covers and similar layouts. Each one began with a lengthy historical and quasi-ethnographic introduction, followed by a section of practical information and, finally, a plethora of touring routes and descriptions. Save for language, Murray’s and Baedeker’s handbooks were almost identical, which was not surprising since the pair incipiently collaborated with one another. At the moment of Italian unifi­ cation in 1861, however, Baedeker began to publish guidebooks in English and wrested the market away from Murray, a move that inaugurated the so-called Age of Baedeker (1870–1914).59 Nonetheless, contemporary guidebooks still make use of the representational systems instituted by these publishers. Or, as James Buzard notes, the works of Murray and Baedeker “naturalized the separation of tourist

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attractions (“Culture”) from mundane continuous life (anthropological “culture”).”60 The sheer quantities of these handbooks published, coupled with their extensive circulation, marked a powerful set of cultural representations about destination Italy that was gaining purchase among the growing tourist masses. In Italy, Murray’s and Baedeker’s handbooks became the dominant textual lenses through which English- and German-speaking tourists experienced the country in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.61 Their numbers were vast, and editions were revised and published rapidly. By 1902, for example, Baedeker had published the thirtieth edition of its German-language handbook to southern Italy and, a year later, the fourteenth edition of the same guidebook in English.62 Moreover, Murray and Baedeker became models for Italian-language guidebooks such as the Guida d’Italia series published by the Touring Club Italiano beginning in 1914. Over the arc of half a century, then, these guidebooks had codified and reproduced the idea of destination Italy innumerable times in recto and verso, which endless streams of tourists then put into practice. Murray’s Handbooks Murray’s guides eschewed the florid language of their Grand Tour predecessors and aimed for a simple, condensed, descriptive style.63 According to Buzard, “the Murray handbook soon became the touring public’s paramount image of an authoritative text, copious in facts and ‘objective’ in description.”64 The first Murray handbooks to Italy were published in the early 1840s. The Handbook for Northern Italy was printed in 1842, and the Handbook for Central Italy and Rome in 1843, with successive editions revised and printed every few years. The first edition of this latter text was based on two journeys that Murray personally made to Rome in 1837 and 1838. It condensed twenty-seven routes, a preface, a lengthy introduction, excursions, an index, and two maps into 568 pages. The preface also demonstrated what would later become several key textual features of guidebooks in general, including a negation of the competition, segmentation, and a disclaimer against change:65 The Central and Southern States of Italy are perhaps of greater interest than any other part of Europe: it has therefore been considered more desirable to describe them in separate volumes than to pass lightly over their historical scenes, or curtail the accounts of a large number of provincial cities, whose

44  The Beautiful Country names are scarcely to be found in any other Guide Book … Instead of describing [Rome] in districts, the objects have been classified under separate heads, in order that the traveller may be enabled at a single glance to ascertain how much or how little it contains of any particular class. In a work of this kind, embracing so great a variety of subjects, there must necessarily be deficiencies. Any corrections or additions, the result of personal observation, authenticated by the names of the parties who are so obliging as to communicate them to the “Editor of the Hand-Books for Travellers,” under cover to the Publisher, will be thankfully employed for future editions.

This preface subtly chastises its competition for passing over provincial cities and historical scenes and, by implication, shores up its own superiority. At the same time, the text explains why it segments Rome into practical, consumable units (so that tourists can easily parse such information). Finally, the handbook provides a disclaimer against change by admitting to its own deficiencies and, in doing so, inoculates itself to the criticism of its imperfections and thus insures its own textual authority. Although the content of Murray’s handbooks was continually revised and updated over the years, their organizational structure remained fundamentally unchanged, which only reinforced the efficacy of their key textual strategies. Indeed, some fifty years after its first edition, the 1891 Handbook for Northern Italy was still organized in the same way as was the original version. Most of this guidebook’s updates, too, were related to travel technologies (such as railways, and hotels with electricity), not historical or artistic itineraries or Italy’s contemporaneous political situation. Interestingly, there is little mention of Italian politics in either Murray’s or Baedeker’s guidebooks, even those published during the Risorgimento. In such ways these texts confirm the observation of Roland Barthes that guidebooks erase political landscapes and empty out organic society so that “the human life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its monuments.”66 The case of Italy adds another dimension to Barthes’s supposition, given that the political state exists as a form with ever-changing contents. Representation of such an impossible state is necessarily difficult. So guidebooks like Murray’s erase the political landscape by ignoring it and focus their attention instead on destination Italy. The same was the case with Baedeker’s guides, which by 1891 had surpassed Murray’s in popularity and cornered the English-language market.

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Baedeker’s Empire Karl Baedeker published his first German-language handbook to Italy in the same year as Italian national unification, 1861.67 This guidebook divided Italy into northern, central, and southern parts, and it was translated, updated, and reprinted every two to three years thereafter. By the time that Baedeker had published a comprehensive guide to Italy in 1890, there were more than thirteen editions of every Italy volume in circulation. The comprehensive guides – alternately titled Italien von den Alpen (1890), Italie des Alpes à Naples (1901), Italy, from the Alps to Naples (1904) – were marketed as abridged guidebooks for “travelers who only have a few weeks at their disposal and intend to devote their time to a rapid survey of the country.”68 In format and content, Baedeker’s guides were similar to Murray’s handbooks. Each edition was bound in a flexible red cover and included a detailed table of contents, preface, introduction, routes, index, and maps. Yet Baedeker’s texts adopted an exceedingly didactic attitude towards their tourist readership. According to Rudy Koshar, “tourism was to be an act of liberation and self-control in which the Baedeker guidebook itself set a good example.”69 Baedeker’s guides not only dictated what ought to be seen but also delineated some very rigid objectives of tourism praxis. The guidebook assumed its readers to be frugal to the core and believed they would be interested in history and art to the exclusion of almost all other things. These guidebooks borrowed routes from Murray and in 1844 began to use asterisks to mark hotels and monuments.70 Bold print and italics were also used to demarcate attractions. While debate always surrounded the assignment of asterisks (for they would increase tourist traffic and revenues), the star system became such common practice that it came to be expected of all guidebooks by the turn of the century. In a 1902 review of MacMillan’s Guide to Italy, for example, the reviewer encouraged the authors to “take a leaf out of Baedeker’s book” and assign asterisks to attractions, as the “often discriminating marks [are] very welcome in large galleries and on extensive sites … and the great majority of tourists would certainly breathe sighs of relief on submitting to [t]his guidance.”71 The stars functioned as signposts of destination Italy’s sightseeing canon – a canon that is, for the most part, still respected by mass tourists today. The frugality was another characteristic that distinguished the Baedeker guidebooks from those published by Murray. The first section

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of every handbook concerned money and travelling expenses. It always included a disciplining narrative voice, supposedly acting in the best interest of the tourist, that dispensed penny-pinching advice. For example, Baedeker’s 1869 edition of Central Italy and Rome explained that the cost of a tour in Italy “need not exceed [that] incurred in the more frequented parts of the continent,” with an average expenditure of twenty-five lire a day.72 The text suggested how to save money on tour, such as by travelling in a group or with someone who knows the language. Tourists were also warned that when they are travelling with ladies, “the expenses are always unavoidably greater.” This was not simply because women demanded “better hotels” and “more comfortable modes of locomotion” but also “because the Italians regard the traveler in this case as wealthier, and therefore a more fitting object for extortion.”73 Here, the guidebook aimed to protect the (presumed male) tourist from getting fleeced. This sexist admonition brings up an interesting point: the most successful mass-produced guidebooks of the era, with the exception of Mariana Starke’s, were written for a male readership by male authors, even though women constituted a significant percentage of the organized touring public at the time. The nineteenth century marked an era of intrepid women travellers, so many that a new market emerged for female travel clothes and products.74 Many of the tourists who took part in the excursions arranged by British tour operator Thomas Cook (often considered the founder of mass tourism) were also women.75 Yet in spite of these plentiful female travellers, Baedeker guides to Italy continued to print the aforementioned caveat about increased expenses and “travelling with ladies” well into the first decade of the twentieth century. All of these characteristics transformed Baedeker into a brand renowned for its prudence and dependability – a product that tourists could fall back on when faced with the uncertainties of foreign travel. The brand has become so successful that today the name Baedeker has been adopted into the Oxford English Dictionary to mean “any guidebook or pamphlet containing useful advice for travellers.”76 Indeed, Baedeker has now come to signify the guidebook itself. Together, Murray’s and Baedeker’s guidebooks systematized and codified a hierarchy of attractions for destination Italy that circulated widely thanks to the technologies of mass production. These texts diffused cultural stereotypes about Italy (and other destinations), which were then actualized by tourists in practice. “Italy has exercised a

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powerful influence on the denizens of the northern lands,” remarks the 1869 edition of Baedeker’s guidebook Italy: A Handbook for Travellers; “a journey thither has often been the fondly cherished wish of many an aspiring traveler.” The text purported to help tourists to “realize to the fullest extent the enjoyment and instruction of which Italy is the fruitful source.”77 Yet this Baedeker guide appeared at a tenuous moment in the history of the Italian state. It was less than a decade after Unification. The capital had moved from Turin to Florence in 1864 and eventually to Rome in 1870. The state’s political infrastructure remained decidedly unstable. The guidebook, however, disavowed this instability to instead privilege destination Italy within its pages. For Baedeker, Italy was strictly a locus of “enjoyment and instruction” – a foremost land of vacation and a site of aesthetic education. Indeed for Baedeker, destination Italy and the tourist guidebook were similar in function: both were sources of education and enjoyment. As a source of education, the guidebook taught tourists how to behave and directed them towards the attractions that ought to be seen, whereas destination Italy educated tourists in all matters of aesthetics by way of its ruins, history, and art. As sources of enjoyment, the guidebook was something of a handbook for sensual pleasure (where to eat, what to see), whereas destination Italy was the site of this delightful indulgence. Put another way, the Baedeker guidebook and destination Italy fundamentally shaped one another, and they mutually constituted a new semiotics of tourism (for example, asterisks) that coalesced around the historical moment of Italian unification and still endures to this day. In sum, guidebooks have evolved in concert with destination Italy over centuries. Their textual (and predominantly stereotypical) representations of Italy and Italians have critically shaped this powerful touristic imaginary, and vice versa. Given the publication history traced in this chapter, it is also clear that the guidebook succeeded in marking off destination Italy as a space congruent to, but still separate from, the unsettled Italian nation state. Yet guidebooks treat the contents of nation and destination – Italians and Italian culture – through repeated tropes and topoi that have served to reify stereotypes instead of resist them. Destination Italy becomes a “beautiful country” that is both an aesthetic space and a space for leisure. It is the site of la dolce vita, of romantic and haunting landscapes, of dramatic architecture and sublime art, and of inhabitants who “ooze style, enjoy the best food in the world and drive with enviable abandon.”78 It is a place once described

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by Gabriel García Márquez as a “homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained.”79 The following chapter shows how this content – the handsome men, the beautiful women, the ancient cities, cats, rubble, and all – expresses an Italy that has since become inseparable from its identity as an idealized space of tourism.

2 Italian Montage: On Rhetoric and Representations

The yellow-taxicab-coloured cover of Italy for Dummies boldly announces its presence among the guidebooks of a bookstore. Its title appears to be scrawled on a blackboard, with the word dummies penned in a childish hand. Just below this titular scribble there is a photograph of a cascade of sunflowers radiating outwards from an aged casa colonica (farmhouse). Its tile roof and crumbling stones strike muted notes against a deep-blue sky. Tuscany. This guidebook is actually part of the For Dummies series, which is an extensive and highly profitable set of instructional manuals on topics as varied as taxes, forensic psychology, and even boosting self-esteem. Each book has a standardized layout and is written in straightforward prose; a triangular-headed cartoon figure known as the Dummies Man points to particularly sage pieces of advice. The goal of the For Dummies series is to simplify complicated issues like taxes or self-esteem and to render them comprehensible to the average person. In such a way, Italy is something that even a “dummy” can understand. Italy for Dummies explains the appeal of destination Italy in a single sentence: “Italy retains an almost mythical status in the minds of many who believe its groundbreaking artistic heritage, voluptuous natural beauty, deceptively simple yet elegant cuisine, and la dolce vita perspective have no equals on earth.”1 This passage frames Italy as the juxtaposition of many elements, and at the same time it reflects the compulsion of many contemporary English-language guidebooks to explain a destination’s appeal within their opening pages. From the outset these texts often make broad generalizations about Italy and Italians and, in so doing, instantiate stereotypes about Italian culture in the broadest of strokes. A later edition of Italy for Dummies sums it up best: “Year after

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year, Italy tops tourist destination lists. Year after year, we keep having the time of our lives in spite of the crowds. Really. And what’s not to like? The food is perfect, the people are welcoming and friendly, the climate is pleasant, and there is art everywhere!”2 This chapter explores the rhetorical functions of the guidebook and, specifically, the tropes and topoi that construct destination Italy as a cohesive touristic imaginary. The guidebooks use visual and verbal fragments – or montage – to imagine Italy as a destination. They are materializations of the interrelated histories of modern Italy and mass tourism. As an object the guidebook was formed by the convergence of three historical events in the mid-nineteenth century: Italian unification, the expansion of mass tourism, and the growing monopolies of Baedeker and Murray. It is also an object that recalls and produces touristic myths about destination Italy (for example, the land of la dolce vita). Accordingly, the guidebook hypostatizes a “living history that can be read from the surfaces of surviving objects” and allows for a dialogue to be opened between the familiar present and the unfamiliar, irreconciled forms of its past.3 Not surprisingly, guidebooks to Italy hearken back to a primal past, that is, an idea of destination Italy signified by notions of tradition and authenticity invented and staged for tourists. These texts often frame Italy as a place that resists modernity – where the sensible and the intelligible still align with one another, where a tourist’s search for authenticity is fulfilled.4 Traces of such a mythic Italy emerge from the guidebook’s pages. To experience destination Italy one must engage the body and senses. It is to immerse oneself, in the words of Italy for Dummies, in artistic heritage, natural beauty, elegant cuisine, la dolce vita. Italy equals sensory stimulation.5 For example, the 2002 edition of Fodor’s Italy evokes taste with a large photo of olives and a caption that reads, “Drive among Umbria’s hill towns, stopping for dishes perfumed with black truffles and sun-kissed olive oil.”6 The 2007 Rough Guide to Italy conjures the haptic as well as the appetite: “Nearby is Catania’s open-air market, with slabs and buckets full of twitching fish, eels, and shellfish and endless lanes full of vegetable and fruit stalls, as well as one or two excellent lunchtime trattorias.”7 By representing sensory engagement as a critical facet of experiencing Italy, the guidebook establishes a field of signs understood through the touristic body, and destination Italy becomes its dominant signifier. As a land of the senses, then, Italy gains emotional purchase within a collective (albeit Western) touristic imagination. Myriad scholars have extensively theorized how sensation mediates space, culture, and

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history, and vice versa; an accounting of the senses allows one to move away from the looking glass of Western visualism and, in the words of Constance Classen, “to move sideways from a suggestive phrase to a characteristic practice to an informative artifact or site, and even inward to one’s own distinctive yet shared corporeal experience, rather than in a linear fashion from narrative to narrative, event to event.”8 The study of the built environment also holds a privileged place in analyses of sensual culture, for the relationship between the built form and the all-sensing human body simultaneously remaps and refigures the limits of both the body and the spaces inhabited.9 While such a detailed history of sensation and embodiment in Italy is not the aim of the present book, it intimates – moving sideways from a suggestive phrase in a guidebook and the shared corporeal experiences of tourists – that such a history does inform the present imaginings of destination Italy. It is a history that opens up new avenues for future research to focus on the ways that sensation collectively patterns touristic understandings of, and interactions with, Italy as destination. This sensual Italy – “naked and swarming Italy,” to borrow the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini – not only has strong emotional purchase in a collective touristic imagination but also has deep roots in historical touring practices.10 For one, Ian Littlewood describes destination Italy as having a sultry climate, where the pleasures of the flesh are too often indulged. It was here, for instance, that male Grand Tourists could explore homosexual desires seemingly without social consequences.11 Even prior to the Grand Tour, British traveller James Howell warned of Italy’s corporeal temptations in his 1642 guidebook, Instructions for Forreine Travell: “And being now in Italy that great limbique of working braines, he [the traveller] must be very circumspect in his carriage, for she is able to turne a Saint into a Devill, and deprave the best natures, if one will abandon himselfe [to pleasure], and become a prey to dissolute courses and wantonesse.”12 Yet during the Grand Tour such sexual profligacy associated with Italy became secondary to its reputation for aesthetic pleasure. In this era destination Italy became a locus of natural beauty, its landscapes and ruins ever pleasing to the tourist’s eye. The topos of il bel paese (the beautiful country) marked Italy off as an aesthetic space, and this chapter explores the way in which Italian-language guidebooks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries oriented Italy towards this sense of aesthetics previously naturalized by the Grand Tour. The guidebooks, written by Italians for Italians, framed destination Italy as a beautiful but empty Barthesian landscape with little relation to the present. It is an essentialized landscape of architectural monuments,

52  The Beautiful Country

archaeological ruins, and artistic masterpieces. Ironically, most of the texts, such as those published by the Touring Club Italiano, were written to help Italians far conoscere l’Italia (to know Italy). Instead, they not only suppressed “at one stroke the reality of the land and its people” but also blinded the very people they suppressed.13 The emphasis on aesthetic beauty, il bel paese, recalled the ambitions of the Grand Tour, and these guidebooks encouraged Italians to become metaphorical Grand Tourists in their own country. Alongside the Italian-language guidebooks, this chapter also examines the common tropes expressed in their English-language counterparts, and, in doing so, it deliberately juxtaposes internal and external imaginings of destination Italy. Guidebooks written in English frame Italy predominantly in terms of leisure, and in particular by using the rhetoric of il dolce far niente (the sweet art of idleness) and la dolce vita (the sweet life). This is a land of vacation where Italians exist as figurative tourists in their own lives. Such an existence, too, implies an arrival at a mythic time and place that stands opposite the industrialized and the modern – a time and place signified by Italy. Arrival here is, again, a tourist’s search for authenticity fulfilled. While the guidebook embodies montage in text, the final part of this chapter explores montage in image and specifically in the form of the picture postcard. It shows that postcards materialize touristic vision by embodying three primary modes of seeing: the historic veduta (panorama), the tourist gaze (close-up), and the travel glance (montage). Moreover, it reveals that the originary postcard view – the panorama – has its origins in the ways of seeing inaugurated by the Grand Tour (that is, vedutismo), and thus the postcard itself is formatively tied to destination Italy. The postcard’s ways of seeing also reveal the travel glance to be the dominant form of touristic vision in the present day. This glance gives rise to a practice of sight sensing rather than just sightseeing. And together postcards and guidebooks effectively bridge the unfamiliar forms of destination Italy’s past with contemporary touristic representations and practices – a dialectic that has been left irreconciled, up until now, with the paradox of the modern Italian state. Italy, Leisure, Aesthetics: Tropes and Topoi In contemporary English- and Italian-language guidebooks to Italy, three rhetorical figurations – il dolce far niente, la dolce vita, and il bel paese – commonly signify destination Italy as an idealized space of tourism. They emphasize sensory stimulation and foreground the experience of

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sight sensing (as opposed to sightseeing) within their pages. In tourism studies numerous scholars have posited that the tourist’s mobile, sensing body gives rise to touristic sense-scapes, which “bear within them emotional and historical sedimentation that can provoke and ignite gestures, discourses, and acts.”14 To be clear, touristic sense-scapes exist in reciprocity with gestures, discourses, and acts for they are embedded not only in prior sensory exchanges but also within ever-shifting networks of material objects. Foremost among these objects is the guidebook. These texts detail myriad Italian sense-scapes that tourists can experience, and, in doing so, guidebooks succeed in constructing the very reality that they appear to describe. Yet the moment that a corpus of texts (like guidebooks or, say, Orientalist writings) realizes a particular imaginary (like Italy or the Orient), attention needs to be paid to the ways in which these texts participate in, as well as perpetuate, specific ideologies. Edward Said has masterfully demonstrated that the interchanges between text and practice mark an operation by which a system of thought (Orientalism) fixes, homogenizes, and overrides the reality of a place (Orient).15 Guidebooks perform precisely this function. These are texts that suffer from “the disease of thinking in essences,” reducing a land and its inhabitants to an empty procession of stereotypes and monuments.16 Much like Orientalist writings normalized the structures of domination in colonial contexts, guidebooks do the same in tourism. Colonial and touristic ideologies are not only intertwined with nationalist discourses in these texts but also predicated upon the perceived mastery of people and places. The difference between these textual expressions of ideology is that, in tourism, guidebooks disavow and conceal the asymmetrical relations of power with a patina of leisure.17 Tourism masquerades as a benign practice wherein amicable hosts willingly subjugate themselves to touring guests – colonized subject is interchangeable with toured subject, as is colonizer with tourist.18 Guidebooks thereby put tourism into practice as both ideology and subjective horizon. Likewise, the rhetorical figurations of il dolce far niente, la dolce vita, and il bel paese delineate Italy as a touristic imaginary and transform it into both a commodity and a stage for unhindered consumption. Il dolce far niente (The Sweet Art of Idleness) The etymological origins of il dolce far niente date to the nineteenth century. Specifically, it came into use after the great historical transformation of capital during the Industrial Revolution, which at the same

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moment saw the expansion of mass tourism across the Mediterranean. This trope initially characterized Italy’s labour force, most often referring to workers from the Italian south. Clearly the contemporaneous debate on the questione meridionale (southern question) influenced il dolce far niente as a trope, in so far as this debate expressed concerns about how to understand (and therefore assimilate) the south within the context of the newly formed Italian state.19 Put differently, the south became a symbolic geography grafted onto, as well as contrasted to, the newly unified territory of the state. It was a geography layered with many stereotypes, idleness being the chief among them. A 1910 postcard exemplifies the conflation between the south and il dolce far niente (figure 2.1). Here a group of Neapolitan scugnizzi (street urchins), ranging from young boys to adult men, lounge atop one another haphazardly. Their gaunt faces, ragged clothes, and bare feet reflect the poverty and hunger of their everyday lives. The caption reads, “Napoli – Scugnizzi – Dolce far niente” (Naples – street urchins – the sweet art of idleness). By pairing il dolce far niente with the pejorative term scugnizzi, the postcard inflects mirth upon the impoverished conditions of this tatterdemalion gang by implying their idleness to be sweet. This postcard represents the historical constellation between il dolce far niente, idleness, Italy’s economic underdevelopment, and the nationalist discourses tied to the southern question. It is a constellation that still persists to this day and often comes to the surface in the imagining of destination Italy. The Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso defines il dolce far niente as “uno stato di ozio felice e spensierato” (a state of happy and carefree idleness) and dates its terminus ante quem to an 1819 edition of the journal Il Conciliatore.20 However, the more detailed Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (UTET dictionary) defines il dolce far niente as “inerzia, oziosità, fannullaggine” (inertia, idleness, do-nothingness) and attributes the term to a much later date as expressed in statesman Massimo D’Azeglio’s 1867 magnum opus, I miei ricordi (My recollections).21 D’Azeglio situates il dolce far niente in the paradox of the Italian state, noting that the inherent doubt about Italian carattere (character) ultimately prevents both Italy’s formation as a political state and its industrial modernization. He writes, “Il dubbio è un gran scappafatica; lo direi quasi il vero padre del dolce far niente italiano” (Doubt is a great [way] to avoid hard work; I would say it [is] almost the true father of the Italian dolce far niente).22 D’Azeglio positions the Italian state vis-­ à-vis its lack of carattere and belated modernization, particularly in

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2.1  Il dolce far niente. Postcard featuring scugnizzi (street urchins) of Naples engaged in il dolce far niente circa 1910. Image reproduced by permission from the Touring Club Italiano Archive, Milan.

comparison to Britain (and the Protestant work ethic). D’Azeglio’s text can only apprehend Italy through belatedness, backwardness, and lack, and it therefore reifies the paradox of the Italian state as something that metaphorically owes its existence to its inability to exist: l’Italia fatta (Italy made) is precisely l’Italia non fatta (Italy not made). That paradox is now denoted by il dolce far niente. In the same vein as D’Azeglio, political philosopher Angelo Mazzoleni contrasted the far niente (idleness or, quite literally, “do nothing”) of the Italians with the far presto (get up and go or, literally, “do early”) of the British in his 1873 treatise, Il popolo italiano (The Italian populace). He, too, could only imagine the Italian state in terms of difference. Mazzoleni writes, “Noi italiani, uopo è pur confessarlo, non siamo neppure i migliori massi del tempo, cui spesso sciupiamo in ninnoli ed in obbrobrioso far niente, causa della nostra povertà in confronto all’opulenza, alla prosperità e coltura intellettuale e morale delle altre nazioni” (We Italians, if necessary still to confess it, are not

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the best [at] blocking time, which we often squander in baubles and in [the] opprobrious far niente, cause of our poverty compared to the opulence, the prosperity, and intellectual and moral cultivation of other nations).23 Here, the term far niente connotes the commercial, intellectual, and cultural poverty of the Italian nation state in contrast to the perceived affluence of others. Like D’Azeglio, Mazzoleni locates the state of Italy in the backwardness of its political development. Unfortunately, he adds, Italian “listlessness” also stymies its economic development:24 Il difetto non è già della pianta uomo, nè del suolo e del clima che la sviluppa, ma di quella fiaccona generale negli Italiani e di cui ci rimprovera spesso il Tedesco Zschokke, chiamandola Italienische Nachlässigkeit. L’Italiano, preso in massa, non lavora che per vivere, mentre l’Inglese vive per lavorare; da noi lavora solo chi vi è forzato e per quanto solo vi è forzato. (The defect is not due to man’s design, nor to the soil and to the climate that develops it, but to that general listlessness in the Italians, and about which the German Zschokke often reprimands us, calling it “Italian carelessness.” The Italian, taken en masse, doesn’t work but to live, while the Englishman lives to work; for us, one works only when forced, and for only as long as one is forced to.)

This passage explicitly links the concept of far niente to labour and designates this aversion to work as being specifically Italian. It is interesting, too, that Mazzoleni appropriates both the German phrase Italienische Nachlässigkeit (Italian carelessness) and a German civil servant (Heinrich Zschokke) to validate his hypothesis, as if the appeal to a German authority would lend credence to his argument. Instead, what this affirmed was the way in which the Italian state could only be understood by what it is not (that is, German). Whereas Mazzoleni’s treatise situated the far niente in the context of the state, one of his noted contemporaries, politician Pasquale Villari, linked it specifically to the Italian south. In his famous Lettere meridionali (Southern letters) published in 1875, Villari appealed to a German authority to underscore the “atrocious calumny” of labour in Naples:25 Ho conosciuto anche un Tedesco, occupato molto nella escavazione di miniere, il quale, essendo andato a passare alcuni mesi di riposo nelle campagne napoletane, mi disse un giorno a Firenze: – Il dolce far niente

Italian Montage 57 degl’Italiani, almeno là dove io sono stato, è una calunnia atroce. Sarebbe impossibile piegare il nostro contadino o il nostro operaio ad un lavoro così duro e prolungato, come quello che fanno i vostri contadini. (I also met a German very busy with mining excavations, who, having gone to spend several months rest in the Neapolitan countryside, told me one day in Florence: – The dolce far niente of the Italians, at least where I was, is an atrocious calumny. It would be impossible to get our farmer or our labourer [in Naples] to do a job so difficult and prolonged, such as that which your peasants do [here in Tuscany].)

By setting the admirable work habits of northern (Florentine) labourers against the lackadaisical ones of their southern counterparts, this Ger­ man businessman (and Villari himself) associated il dolce far niente with the racially marked Italian south. Given the wide reach of Villari’s letters, as well as their importance in shaping what John Dickie has d ­ escribed as the entire ideological project of the southern question, the text’s linking of il dolce far niente and southernness embedded this discursive idleness into the debates on the Italian state.26 One century later, English-language guidebooks ascribed il dolce far niente to destination Italy as a whole. In these texts the south metamorphosed into Italy, and southerners metaphorically transformed into Italians. What was once simply a life lacking in employment metamorphosed into a life filled with ample time for licit (and illicit) leisure. For example, the 2002 Fodor’s Guide to Italy states that Italians have perfected such a life of leisure: “It was the Italians who perfected il dolce far niente – the sweet art of idleness – and all signs show they did it in Liguria. Flanking Genoa, an art-filled city of long-decaying splendor, the twin Rivieras bask in the sun, dotted with seaside summer resorts and quaint pastel villages.”27 The passage evokes the senses with visions of the decadent and the picturesque along with the haptic pleasures of sunbathing at the seaside. Here Italians adamantly refuse the conventions of work and embrace il dolce far niente, sweetly trifling the days away on the Ligurian coast. With this idleness, il dolce far niente casts Italians as having a leisurely existence; they are figurative tourists in their own lives. Or il dolce far niente evokes Italians as metaphorical doubles of tourists themselves. Translated into terms of tourism theory, tourists who come to Italy are not necessarily searching for authenticity in an exotic Other but are instead looking for themselves in comparable tourists as subjects: Italians.28

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Likewise, destination Italy seduces the senses. The 2000 edition of the  UpClose guide warns tourists of the potential for sensory over-­ stimulation in Italy:29 Countless others have “discovered,” over the centuries, the pleasure of that first bite of tiramisù or that first view of Florence’s red rooftops – a sixteenth-century writer even warned “guileless youth against the irresistible seductions of Italy.” You’ll find no such warnings here, but be advised that you will discover the downside of Italy, perhaps on a sweltering summer afternoon, thirsty and tired, as you consider the many contrasts of twentieth-century life here: traffic jams, ancient ruins, curious stares from the locals, pollution, Baroque cathedrals, and Vespa drivers swerving though narrow streets as they chat on cellular phones. Ironically, the country that produced the likes of Michelangelo, Dante, and Galileo also perfected the dolce far niente.

In this passage, destination Italy is deliciously sensual, but it can also over-stimulate – and endanger – the tourist’s body with heat, pollution, and even distracted Vespa drivers. Yet leisure as il dolce far niente is still privileged here. While the tourist’s senses are occasionally subject to discomfort, they more often experience pleasure in bites of tiramisù and spectacular rooftop views. Indeed, the text implies that leisure – or, at the very least, benevolent idleness – is the rule of life in destination Italy. Other English-language guidebooks, like those of intrepid cicerone Rick Steves, confirm this supposition. The 2001 edition of Rick Steves’ Italy notes that il dolce far niente has ostensibly become a secular religion in Italy:30 “Italy, home of the Vatican, is Catholic, but the dominant religion is life – motor scooters, soccer, fashion, girl watching, boy watching, good coffee, good wine, and la dolce far niente (‘the sweetness of doing nothing’) … La dolce far niente [sic] is a big part of Italy. Zero in on the fine points. Don’t dwell on the problems. Accept Italy as Italy. Savor your cappuccino, dangle your feet over a canal (if it smells, breathe through your mouth), and imagine what it was like centuries ago.” In this passage the text commands its tourist-readers in a disciplining narrative voice to enjoy “Italy as Italy.” Its authority is predicated on the ability to define il dolce far niente (“savor your cappuccino; dangle your feet over a canal”). It explains how to practice il dolce far niente (“zero in on the fine points; don’t dwell on the problems”) and even goes so far as to supervise control of the senses (“if it smells, breathe through your

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mouth”). Ironically, the text’s authority is undermined by a grammatical error, that is, the assignment of an incorrect definite article, la instead of il (it was corrected in later editions). Yet this error does not take away from the fact that il dolce far niente signifies, as it does in most Englishlanguage guidebooks, a life of leisure cast as the Italian way of life. Tellingly, Italian-language guidebooks do not use this trope. While this might be viewed as deliberate resistance to the linguistic hegemony and cultural stereotypes present in English-language guidebooks, it is more likely a (perhaps unconscious) circumvention of the economic and political projects that comprise the trope’s origin: Italy’s belated modernization and its southern question. As counterpoint to the unsettled Italian state, destination Italy must be presented as a cohesive whole. Any implication of belatedness, backwardness, and lack would disrupt the representational apparatus and otherwise threaten its failure as a touristic imaginary. And so, il dolce far niente remains excluded from Italian-language guidebooks in the present day. La dolce vita (The Sweet Life) In most contemporary English-language guidebooks to Italy, the trope of la dolce vita overshadows that of il dolce far niente. The UTET dictionary defines la dolce vita as “un’esistenza frivola e lussuosa” (a frivolous and luxurious existence), its origin traceable to the eponymous 1960 film directed by Federico Fellini.31 The film depicts a hedonistic lifestyle devoted to pleasure in late-1950s Rome. In its most famous scene an American movie star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) wades uninhibited into the Trevi Fountain, a spontaneous act that inspires her journalist companion, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), to follow. As he steps into the fountain, Marcello feels liberated from the mediocrity of his quotidian life, plunging both physically and metaphorically into a newer, sweeter life of excess.32 Fellini’s film presents a bittersweet portrait of a city, and by implication a country, caught amidst the whirl of reconstruction and modernization following the Second World War.33 It also inaugurates a new era of Italian glamour. No longer was the country simply a picturesque backwater; now it was infused with an air of scandal and sex appeal. There is a great deal of scholarship on the film itself that is too vast to be addressed in detail, but suffice it to say that La Dolce Vita – along with several other films (for example, Roman Holiday) and a newfound Italian star system (that is, Marcello Mastroianni, Vittorio Gassman,

60  The Beautiful Country

Sophia Loren) – inaugurated a perceptible shift in the way that Italy was viewed by the rest of the world.34 The film did much to re-signify Italy in the cultural imagination. No longer was it la povera Italietta (poor little Italy) rebuilding after the Second World War, or home to the mass exodus of poor, bedraggled immigrants in the late-nineteenth century; now it was a romanticized place of beauty, design, sex, and glamour. Stephen Gundle elaborates: “Italian glamour combined sex and style for foreigners. The country became an image to be consumed, to be bought into and to be savored in small doses, by means of a film, a vacation, a meal in a restaurant, an item of clothing, or a domestic appliance … Celebrity, surface, and image triumphed.”35 English-language guidebooks accordingly adopted la dolce vita to evoke Italy not only as a land of leisure but also as one of sensual excess. Whereas Marcello’s body became the crux of a hedonistic lifestyle in the film, guidebooks cast destination Italy as a place in which the tourist’s body experiences sensual pleasure (that is, sun, sea, sand, and sex – the four S’s of modern tourism). For example, the 1999 edition of the Frommer’s Italy guidebook links aesthetic and sensory stimulation to la dolce vita:36 Some of today’s visitors long to get to know the people, as did novelist E.M. Forster, who wrote that the Italians are “more marvelous than the land.” Others are drawn to the treasury of artworks by masters like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio and to the treasury of architecture leading from the Etruscans to Palladio. Still others come for the scenery: cypress-studded landscapes, coastal coves, Dolomite peaks, fishing ports, sandy beaches, and charming little hill towns. And there are those lured by the variety of cuisines – nowhere else in the world does Italian food taste so marvelous. Of course, most travelers to Italy are looking for a little taste of everything above. And Italy, with its cultural heritage and sense of la dolce vita, provides a vast menu from which to choose.

On the one hand, this passage frames Italy as inseparable from aesthetic accumulation. By listing the landscapes, artwork, and architecture that are to be consumed visually, the guidebook arbitrates the social acquisition of taste.37 On the other, Italy stimulates taste with its cuisine (“nowhere else in the world does Italian food taste so marvelous”), and the text re-affirms destination Italy as the domain of the senses. The inaugural edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Italy, published in 1993, also links the trope of la dolce vita to activities that stimulate

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the senses. The text’s introduction describes the country thus: “This land of vibrant, expressive people has given the world pasta and pizza, Michelangelo and Da Vinci, Dante and Machiavelli, Catholicism and a vast array of saints and martyrs, Verdi and Pavarotti, Fellini and Sophia Loren, not to mention the Mafia, a remarkable sense of style and la dolce vita.”38 The text recalls the senses in turn – from taste (pasta and pizza), to vision (Michelangelo, Fellini), to hearing (Verdi, Pavarotti) – demonstrating the land of la dolce vita to be one of complete sensory stimulation. Yet this passage also fragments and flattens destination Italy by metonymically itemizing representations of Italian culture. Here, art equals Michelangelo and Leonardo; literature is Dante and Machiavelli; Verdi and Pavarotti represent music; Fellini and Loren symbolize cinema; the mafia is crime; and style refers to the nexus of Italian fashion, glamour, and celebrity. La dolce vita is the final item on this list, but one without a corresponding metonym. Instead, the trope signifies the accumulation of cultural capital, that is, the acquisition of aesthetic taste and social distinction gained from a trip to Italy.39 Per the Lonely Planet, Italy functions today as it did during the Grand Tour: tourists achieve status, knowledge, and sophistication by travelling here and incorporating la dolce vita in body, mind, and senses. Other English-language guidebooks like the aforementioned Italy for Dummies attach the trope to recent projects of modernization. In the following passage from this text Italians have already achieved la dolce vita and are now simply improving on it:40 It seems everyone wants to visit Italy these days, especially because of the tremendous efforts (both public and private) to restore, refurbish, and modernize the country to celebrate the Papal Jubilee in 2000. These efforts have saved monuments from years of neglect and made Italy even more glorious. In addition, you’ll find an even greater awareness of visitor’s needs, with many attractions staying open late in summer and accommodations offering more (and improved) services. A language barrier remains, of course – unless you know Italian – but that’s hardly insurmountable if you remember a few key words and phrases. You’ll find the Italian people warm and welcoming and ready to help ease you into la dolce vita.

Whereas il dolce far niente was connected to labour and industrialization, la dolce vita is represented in this text as distinct but also in line to benefit from the country’s modernization efforts in advance of the jubilee in 2000. The restorations, extended business hours, new accommodations,

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and improved services are all parts of a touristic infrastructure that supports destination Italy as a space that stands opposite the modern, and, as this passage shows, a space in which la dolce vita continues to be modernized. Here the trope calls into being an illusion, an image, and a myth of destination Italy forthwith naturalized as a space of leisure. Il bel paese (The Beautiful Country) Contemporary Italian-language guidebooks rarely engage the tropes of il dolce far niente and la dolce vita in their descriptions of Italy because the former calls to mind the sensitive issues of belated modernization and the southern question, and the latter suggests that leisure is a condition of everyday life (a matter quickly proven false by the unending political and economic crises of the state). In fact, few Italian-language guidebooks treat the country in its entirety unless they are written for a specific market niche. One cannot find a complete guidebook to Italy à la Lonely Planet or Frommer’s but only specialized guides like Italia termale, Italia gastronomica, or Italia in moto that describe the country’s spas, foodways, and motorcycle routes, respectively. Comprehensive guides to Italy, such as the Touring Club Italiano’s Guida d’Italia series, are always partitioned into cities, regions (for example, Lazio, Veneto), or political geographies (for example, north, south, central Italy). Yet if they do refer to the country as a whole, these guidebooks commonly frame it within the topos of il bel paese (the beautiful country). Initially, this topos described the natural beauty of the landscape; however, it now marks Italy as an aesthetic space rather than a leisure space. Italian-language guidebooks encourage tourists to appreciate the variegated beauty of the art and antiquities that complement nature in this “beautiful country.”41 Put differently, these guidebooks propose an aesthetic education for Italians similar to that of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. The rhetoric of il bel paese encourages Italian tourists to appreciate the beauties of art, architecture, antiquity, and nature – to act as Grand Tourists in their own country. The origins of il bel paese as a topos are literary, with the earliest references found in Dante’s Inferno (XXXIII.79–81) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (RVF 61 and 146).42 In Inferno Dante the poet launches an invective against Pisa as the shame of “the beautiful land where the sì is heard”: “Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti / del bel paese là dove ’l sì suona, / poi che i vicini a te punir son lenti” (Ah, Pisa! Shame of the peoples / of the beautiful land where the sì is heard / since your neighbors are slow to

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punish you).43 In this tercet Pisa is part of the “beautiful land of the sì,” which Dante defined in De vulgari eloquentia as the province of an Italian-speaking populace.44 The city’s neighbours were also Tuscan (Florence and Lucca), and together they revealed il bel paese to be a topos that delineated a political geography (Tuscany) as defined by linguistic usage. Similarly, Petrarch’s two lyric poems both reference Dante and link il bel paese to specific places: Avignon, Provence, and Italy. The sonnet RVF 61 refers to the “blessed” moment Petrarch first saw his beloved, Laura, in Avignon: “Benedetto sia ’l giorno, e ’l mese, et l’anno, / et la stagione, e ’l tempo, et l’ora, e ’l punto, / e ’l bel paese, e ’l loco ov’io fui guinto / da’ duo begli occhi che legato m’ànno” (Blessed be the day and the month and the year / and the season and the time and the hour and the instant / and the beautiful country, and the place where I was struck / by the two lovely eyes that have bound me).45 Here the topos simultaneously evokes Avignon and Provence and makes an intertextual reference to Inferno XXXIII.80 as well as an intratextual reference to RVF 146.46 In the latter poem il bel paese refers to a greater imaginary of Italy in the final tercet: “Poi che portar nol posso in tutte et quattro / parti del mondo, udrallo il bel paese / ch’Appennin parte, e ’l mar circonda et l’Alpe” (Since I cannot bear it to all four / parts of the world, the beautiful country shall hear it / that the Apennines divide and the sea and the Alps surround).47 While this poetic image likely represented Petrarch’s reference to his own fame, it is also true that the topos of il bel paese was linked to political geography.48 This association began as municipal and regional (for example, Pisa, Tuscany, Avignon, and Provence) and later connected to a broader idea of Italy even though it did not yet exist as a political state.49 It was only in the nineteenth century that il bel paese became connected to the Italian state. This topos articulated political and natural spheres in Antonio Stoppani’s eponymous 1876 work, Il Bel Paese: Conversazioni sulle bellezze naturali. La geologia e la geografica fisica d’Italia (The beautiful country: Conversations on natural beauty. The geology and physical geography of Italy).50 The text describes the geology, flora, and fauna of the Italian peninsula in detail, presenting them in a series of didactic fireside chats with a naturalist. In his introduction Stoppani references Petrarch and explains that il bel paese must be imagined in terms of the relationship between the natural landscape and the unified Italian state. For him all Italians carried a duty to “conoscere cioè la storia fisica e naturale del proprio paese” (to know the physical and natural

64  The Beautiful Country

history of their country). To know this history, he writes, will create sentiments of national belonging among Italy’s populace.51 Stoppani intended his work to be a romanzo scientifico (scientific novel) that would amplify the moral arguments about the Italian state presented in the genre of the romanzo storico (historical novel), which had become extremely popular in Italy after the success of Alessandro Manzoni’s 1842 masterpiece, I Promessi Sposi (The betrothed). In other words, what Manzoni did for modern Italian literature, Stoppani hoped to accomplish for the natural sciences.52 He argued that his work would “soddisfare al bisogno sentitissimo che hanno gl’Italiani di conoscere l’Italia … [è] un gran bisogno della nazione” (satisfy the deeply felt need that Italians have to know Italy … it is a great need of the nation).53 Stoppani, too, was writing at the moment of scientific positivism. His text emphasized the interdependence between careful observation and scientific theory (a method adopted straight from Auguste Comte) to represent the natural beauty of Italy. At moments the narrator declared his great respect for the scientists who regularly braved extreme physical conditions in the pursuit of scientific truth. Stoppani venerated these intrepid “uomini della scienza” (men of science). To him they were “apostoli del vero” (apostles of truth).54 Thus, Il Bel Paese connected literary and scientific genealogies in a singular text, and, in doing so, it prefigured the quasi-ethnographic travel narratives and proto-anthropological studies of Italy’s overseas territories that emerged decades later.55 In the same way that Comte’s scientific positivism and Manzoni’s historical novel inspired Stoppani, he in turn inspired the founder of the Touring Club Italiano, Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli. Bertarelli considered Stoppani to be a teacher and in 1908 proclaimed that if Stoppani were still alive, “bisognerebbe forse modificare lo statuto del Touring per creare a lui un posto di ‘presidente d’onore’” (perhaps it would be necessary to amend the statute of the Touring Club Italiano to create a position of honorary president for him).56 Bertarelli lavished great praise on Stoppani’s text, which, thirty years after publication, he still considered as “fresco come quando fu scritto, splendente di quell’impronta preziosa dei grandi ingegni” (fresh as when it was written, resplendent with that unique mark of great minds).57 Inspired, Bertarelli implemented a campaign to far conoscere l’Italia (to know Italy) through tourism that privileged both natural and monumental landscapes. The Touring Club Italiano’s guidebooks reflected these ideas, and in fact two of the TCI’s editorial series were called Conosci l’Italia and Il Bel Paese, respectively. The first series described the natural landscape of

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“the beautiful country” and made the case for the aesthetic education of Italians:58 Con il volume dedicato al Paesaggio, la collana «Conosci l’Italia», che si propone di illustrare la natura, le antichità, la storia e l’arte del nostro Paese, torna a dedicare la sua attenzione all’ambiente naturale nel quale viviamo. L’importanza della bellezza e della singolarità dei paesaggi italiani nel quadro generale dei richiami turistici non consentiva infatti di trascurare l’illustrazione degli aspetti naturali di una Terra che ha meritato, prima dagli scrittori, poi da tutti, il titolo di “Bel Paese.” (With the volume dedicated to landscape, the series Conosci l’Italia – which aims to illustrate the nature, antiquity, history, and art of our country – once again dedicates its attention to the natural environment in which we live. The importance of the beauty and the uniqueness of Italian landscapes to the general framework of touristic attractions does not permit [us], in fact, to neglect the illustration of the natural aspects of a Land that has merited, first by writers, and then by all, the title of “Bel Paese.”)

This passage implies that the guidebook implicitly seeks to offer an education that goes deeper than touristic superficies. Italy’s unique beauty, according to the text, must be appreciated aesthetically. On the same page the guidebook encourages Italians to put this text into practice: Conduce la trama di questo efficace appropriato corredo illustrativo una descrizione chiara, tersa e scorrevole che accompagna il lettore attraverso la visione di quanto v’è di meglio e di più significativo nel volto naturale e vivente del nostro bel Paese, trasportandolo ora dalla lettura all’immagine, ora da questa alle righe del testo, in piacevole vicenda. (The plot of this incisive, apposite, illustrative apparatus leads to a clear, clean, and fluid description that accompanies the reader through the vision of what is best and most meaningful about the natural and existing facet[s] of our bel Paese, transporting [the reader] at once from the act of reading to the image, and at once from this [image] to the lines of the text, in [a] pleasurable affair.)

The text directs the tourist gaze across the landscape and outlines the transformation of aesthetic vision into leisure, an overall pleasurable

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affair (piacevole vicenda). Here the guidebook functions as a textual apparatus that not only outlines what ought to be seen but also catalyses the interchange between text and touristic practice. For the 1949 Touring Club guidebook Conosci l’Italia: Vademecum del turista, such practice took on a political charge. To turn the tourist gaze onto the beautiful country offered Italians “encouragement and hope” in the devastating aftermath of the Second World War:59 Questo volume vuol essere un incoraggiamento e un augurio. Vuole esortare tutti gli Italiani, e specialmente i giovani, a conoscere la Patria; e vuole guidarli nell’uso intelligente di tutti i mezzi che il moderno turismo può offrire allo studio e all’amore del nostro Paese in tutti i suoi aspetti … Il Bel Paese. Questo è il titolo del primo libro che descrisse turisticamente l’Italia unificata, pochi anni dopo il Risorgimento: Il Bel Paese dell’abate Antonio Stoppani, edito nel 1875. (This volume wants to be encouragement and hope. It wants to urge all Italians, especially the youth, to know the Patria; and it wants to advise them in the intelligent use of all the means that modern tourism can offer for the study and love of our country in all of its aspects … The Bel Paese. This is the title of the first book that touristically describes unified Italy, a few years after the Risorgimento: Il Bel Paese of the abbot, Antonio Stoppani, published in 1875.)

Clearly this guidebook attempts to foster patriotic love among Italians. It focuses attention on the beauty of Italy while de-emphasizing the country’s defeat by Allied forces in the Second World War. By understanding Italy as a space of aesthetics – rather than a space of Fascism or a space of war – the text opens up the possibility for Italians to sidestep their contemporary history and all of its bitterness, embarrassment, pain, and suffering. Tragedy infused almost every social fabric in post-Fascist Italy, a heartbreaking existence that neorealist directors captured so poignantly on film. The guidebook implicitly stages il bel paese as a counterpoint to this disorder. The topos therefore became a positive signifying force around which Italy could be rebuilt, and tourism became the means to do so. Contemporary Italian-language guidebooks continue to emphasize the relationship between aesthetics and il bel paese. For example, the 2008 Guida d’Italia: Toscana (Guide to Italy: Tuscany) published by Touring Club Italiano recognized “la bellezza diffusa” (widespread beauty) as the primary reason to visit the region, but warned:60

Italian Montage 67 Attenzione, però. Si viene nel «bel Paese d’Arno» per Giotto e Masaccio, per Donatello e per Brunelleschi, per Botticelli e per Michelangelo – questo è vero – ma se la visita avesse per obbiettivo soltanto il confronto con quei grandi essa sarebbe assai faticosa e non so quanto producente. Chi attraversa la Toscana deve capire che la bellezza testimoniata nei capolavori d’arte riprodotti sulle guide e sui manuali stampati in tutte le lingue del mondo, non è che l’apice glorioso della bellezza diffusa nelle campagne e nei paesi, nelle piazze e nelle strade, riflessa nel colore delle pietre, nell’ordine delle coltivazioni, nelle parole della gente, finanche nel sapore dei cibi. (Be careful, though: one comes to the “bel Paese of the Arno” for Giotto and Masaccio, Donatello and Brunelleschi, Botticelli and Michelangelo – this is true – but if the visit had the comparison of those grand [artists] as its sole objective then it would be quite tiresome, and I don’t know how productive. Whoever travels across Tuscany should understand that the beauty evidenced by the masterpieces of art (reproduced in guidebooks and manuals printed in all languages of the world) is but the glorious apex of the widespread beauty in the countryside and towns, piazzas and streets, reflected in the colour of the stones, in the order of crops, in the words of the people, and even in the flavour of foods.)

To view and appreciate artistic masterpieces is a necessary component of touring Tuscany in the present day, says this guidebook, just as it was a fundamental part of the Grand Tour. The aesthetic education to be had then is still offered now. What is more, the text implies that this education would be incomplete without the activation of the senses. Although dominated by sight, the experience of il bel paese also includes hearing the words of the people (“le parole della gente”) and tasting the flavours of food (“il sapore dei cibi”). Thus, il bel paese links Tuscany, and broadly Italy, to an education that is both aesthetic and sensory. Put differently, this text written in Italian for Italians metaphorically positions them as practitioners of both sightseeing and sight sensing in the bel paese. Yet the guidebook, like tourism generally, tends to privilege vision. These texts are eyewitness guides that delineate what ought to be seen, often by way of glossy colour inserts and illustrations. Technologies like the camera and the video recorder reinforce this primacy of vision in touristic practice, helping tourists to record and remember what they have seen. To wit, these various modes of vision manifest in material form, that is, in the most ubiquitous of touristic objects: the postcard.

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Materializing Vision: Postcards from Italy As Antonio Stoppani penned his natural history in the mid-nineteenth century, new vistas, or belvedere (panoramic viewpoints), emerged in the bel paese. In Italian the word belvedere became linked to tourism around 1860 – precisely at the moment of political unification – as “an elevated place designed or situated to look out upon a pleasing scene,” a site where travellers could stop and survey the landscape.61 The invention of the belvedere – from the Italian bel (beautiful) + vedere (view) – signalled a new way of seeing that was born of mass tourism, with tourists using this panoramic vision, or veduta, to dominate landscape with their gazes.62 It was also at this moment, circa 1865, that the massproduced tourist postcard was born. The panorama was just one of several new modes of vision spawned by tourism. John Urry has well documented the invention of the tourist gaze.63 He argued that sightseeing has a long history of social organization and systematization, which can be divided among three key ­dichotomies: romantic-collective, authentic-inauthentic, and historicalmodern.64 The tourist gaze moves along these vectors and shifts in accordance with varying social and cultural practices. More recently, Jonas Larsen has theorized the travel glance, a mobile counterpoint to Urry’s static, photographic tourist gaze. Larsen describes the travel glance as the “visual sensing of passing landscape images through the window of various mobility technologies,” in other words, how to see and experience the world in motion.65 Specifically, Larsen explores forms of motorized flânerie (such as trains and buses) and how they oblige tourists to only glimpse, ever so fleetingly, the landscapes and panoramas around them. These travel glances constitute a quasi-cinematic experience in which tourists experience a flowing montage of images through the windows of their tour buses, trains, and airplanes.66 Postcards ­materialize these varying modes of touristic vision. In general, postcards today have three dominant representational styles – panorama, close-up, and montage – which correspond to the historical and technological genealogies that have informed the evolution of sightseeing: veduta, tourist gaze, and travel glance.67 This third mode of vision, too, translates the textual montage of the guidebook into a visual montage for touristic consumption. As Larsen notes, the increasingly mobile world has transformed the travel glance into the dominant form of touristic vision, and accordingly the montage has become the predominant form of its material manifestation, the postcard.

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Panorama and veduta The history of the tourist postcard can be traced to the belvedere. The postcard was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and its history has been covered extensively in scholarship, which has shown how it functions as a souvenir, a collectible, a gift, a ritual communication, and an affirmation of social networks.68 Postcards also reflect key cultural and interactional enactments of contemporary globalization, according to Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski.69 Transient subjects – tourists – inscribe social meanings through their succinct messages written on postcards. In addition to this, Thurlow and Jaworski treat postcards as things in motion that illuminate cultural and human contexts by constituting a social life of travelling objects.70 Things in motion tell their own stories, and in the case of destination Italy the representational strategies of the postcard can be traced to the impossible vistas first developed during the Grand Tour. The panoramic view of landscape was and is one of the most popular subjects of tourist postcards, a belvedere par excellence. Celebrated ­eighteenth-century masters like Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Gaspar Van Wittel (Vanvitelli), and especially Giovanni Battista Piranesi created ersatz views – vedute – of landscapes, architecture, and ruins and founded both the genre and the movement known as vedutismo (landscape painting). Although Venice was considered the centre for these vedutisti (landscape painters), Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) emerged as the most popular artistic work of the Grand Tour. Originally produced during the 1740s, the 133 etchings that initially comprised Piranesi’s Vedute represented “the colossal structures of antiquity … delineated with unparalleled accuracy, shown ravished by decay and populated by a diminutive breed of humanity overawed by its majestic inheritance.”71 Rome was Piranesi’s muse, and he revised and embellished the Vedute for the rest of his life. He often represented vistas that would have been impossible to view first-hand in his day, such as a quasi-aerial view of the Colosseum (1761). Instead, Piranesi improvised, using his imagination to fill in the gaps of what he could not witness visually.72 Piranesi and his counterparts therefore created fantasies of landscape, antiquity, and architecture: a montage of unreal fragments that, almost always, constituted a panorama. These etched vedute were among the most popular souvenirs of the Grand Tour. A 1927 catalogue of Piranesi’s Vedute described them as “l’opera più completa dell’insigne acquafortista … sono forse le più

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conosciute in Europa. Infatti, quale viaggiatore venendo a visitare l’Italia ne ripartiva senza avere acquistate come ricordo le ‘Vedute’ del maestro?” (The most comprehensive work of the distinguished engraver … they are perhaps the most well-known in Europe. In fact, what visitor, coming to visit Italy, departs without having acquired the maestro’s Vedute as a souvenir?)73 Piranesi’s panoramas lent themselves to the aesthetic education that was the goal of the Grand Tour, and, more important, they were easy to transport home. As Tarnya Cooper notes, these works circulated so widely that first-time visitors to Rome experienced the strange sensation of already knowing the city’s topography. They felt disoriented by the dissonance between what they were seeing on the ground and what they remembered of Piranesi’s depictions. “Being in Rome,” she added, “became a sort of dialogue between the remembered and the real.”74 These etchings, and the advent of vedutismo generally, established the panorama as a dominant mode of tourist vision in eighteenth-century Italy. Maria Antonella Fusco directly links vedutismo to tourism and argues that the touristic demand for images of Italy sustained many vedutisti financially. She writes, “La ricerca sul mercato di repliche invariate della stessa veduta aumenta in misura proporzionale alla loro diffusione nelle case” (Research on the market of unchanging replicas of the same veduta [shows that demand for them] increases in proportion with their diffusion in homes).75 While the prints of Piranesi were rather large, other vedutisti began to miniaturize and reproduce their drawings for tourist consumption, making them cheaper and easier to transport. Physically, vedute were extremely small but durable gouaches mounted on cardboard. In content they represented recognizable panoramas like the Colosseum and the Roman Forum that served as proof of the tourist’s visit. The vedutisti also developed niches among themselves; for example, Salvatore Fergola specialized in the gulf of Naples and Vesuvius, and Piranesi, of course, in Rome. Tourists would acquire their works at the places they visited, and then display and circulate these miniature images of Italy back home; in doing so, they symbolically completed their aesthetic education. In form and content, then, the veduta marked what Fusco called the invention of the postcard view: “È senz’altro l’atto di nascita della veduta-cartolina, emblema di un luogo, souvenir ‘un po’ fatto colla stampiglia’” (It is certainly the birth of the postcard view, emblem of a place, [a] souvenir ‘made somewhat by imprint’).76 These pictures from Italy established the panorama as a dominant mode of touristic vision in

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the era of the Grand Tour. Some postcards today continue to reflect this panoramic mode of seeing, echoing the same impossible vistas that were set forth by Piranesi centuries earlier (figures 2.2 and 2.3). Yet other modes of seeing – the tourist gaze and the travel glance – now dominate the materialization of touristic vision. Close-Up and Tourist Gaze The second most popular postcard view is that of the close-up, which corresponds to another touristic mode of vision, the tourist gaze. By nature these postcards are fundamentally metonymic; they depict a singular monument or a scenic microcosm to symbolize an entire destination. In Rome, for instance, close-up postcards might focus solely on the Spanish Steps or the Trevi Fountain; a street scene with cats lounging in a wheelbarrow; or a statue of the Capitoline wolf with Romulus and Remus (figure 2.4). Here all of Rome is represented by a single part detailed in close-up. Both the close-up and the tourist gaze are closely related to the invention of photography, the technology that changed mass tourism altogether. The so-called golden age of the postcard in the early-twentieth century came to an end as photographic cameras became more compact and widely available.77 Tourists no longer needed to buy representations created by someone else, because they could now take their own photographs. Alternatively they could buy a mass-produced postcard that showed a picture of their destination. To wit, the practice of tourism has always been ocular-centric. To travel is still very much to see, even though scholars are now devoting much more (long overdue) attention to the relationship between travel and the other senses.78 The tourist gaze first proposed by Urry is best thought of as a gaze activated by the “peculiar combining together of the means of collective travel, the desire for travel and the techniques of photographic reproduction.”79 It is the process of gazing at what one encounters as a tourist. Urry adds that the tourist gaze is as socially organized and as systemized as the gaze of Foucault’s medic. It is a gaze that simultaneously shapes and is shaped by varying structures of power, perceptions of difference, viewing subjects, and objects viewed.80 In spite of these shifting social and cultural constellations the tourist gaze is an ostensibly static one. It is predicated upon the representational practices of photography and, specifically, photography’s ability to “fix” the object being viewed in both space and time. Taking a

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2.2 and 2.3  Contemporary postcards reproducing the vistas set forth in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous Le vedute di Roma (The views of Rome), originally produced in the 1740s. Above (2.2): Piranesi’s etching of an aerial view of the Colosseum, impossible during his time. Facing page (2.3): a postcard of the same panorama. Image reproduced courtesy of ArtStor; postcard reproduced by permission from Millenium Editrice, Rome, 2011.

photograph instils in the photographer mock forms of dominance and possession: the mastery over landscape and the control of the past, present, and future.81 To achieve the desired photograph the tourist photographer must arrest all movement, focus the lens gaze on a static attraction, and perhaps even admonish friends and family members to pose motionless within the scene. In short, the tourist gaze is both photographic and stationary. To borrow the words of Jonas Larsen, “the gazing eye has a detached, static and fixated, rather than a dynamic and moving, relationship with the represented object.”82 By focusing attention on a singular object like Rome’s Capitoline she-wolf, the tourist gaze becomes both the frame and the window onto the destination ­(figure 2.4).

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Postcards embody the power of the tourist gaze to transform site into sight through the close-up. In addition to being a metonym for the destination at hand, the close-up postcard becomes a metaphor for the sight sacralization involved in constructing a tourist attraction generally. Sight sacralization designates a place or an object as worthy of preservation for tourists; it becomes something that ought to be seen. Dean MacCannell has famously described this process in five steps: (1) naming, (2) framing and elevating, (3) enshrinement, (4) mechanical reproduction, and (5) social reproduction.83 The close-up postcard accomplishes this operation in miniature and in doing so becomes an apparatus that shores up the process of sight sacralization.84 First, the postcard typically names the site represented. Either the place name is superimposed directly atop the image or it augments a stock phrase (for example, “Greetings from …”). Often the place name and the stock phrase are written in the destination language (that is, Roma, Firenze, Venezia; “Saluti da …”) as if to imbue the postcard with a linguistic authenticity and therefore validate the authenticity of the tourist’s experience. Second, the postcard’s borders

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2.4  Postcard of Roman she-wolf with Romulus and Remus, 2011. The close-up postcard embodies a static tourist gaze, which is fundamentally metonymic, substituting a singular image, like the Roman she-wolf, for an entire vacation. Postcard reproduced by permission from Millenium Editrice, Rome, 2011.

simultaneously frame and elevate the close-up image. Many postcards leave a white border around the image, which focuses the eye on the close-up and enhances the viewed object. Third, the captions on the postcard’s verso enshrine the attraction, in so far as they both describe and mark the frame (the image on the postcard’s recto). MacCannell writes that when the framing material that is used has itself entered the first stage of sacralization (naming), the enshrinement stage has been entered.85 For example, a close-up postcard of Rome that depicts a scenic microcosm – a street scene with cats lounging in a wheelbarrow – has the caption “Medieval houses near the Campo de’ Fiori square” written in five different languages. The caption names the postcard – the framing material of the attraction – and enshrines the sight while linguistically authenticating that operation of enshrinement. Fourth, the close-up postcard is mechanically reproduced, as are all other postcards. Fifth, the close-up postcard and its tourist gaze are socially

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reproduced as they get circulated, by being sent home to relatives, kept as a souvenir, or inserted into a postcard collection. The social life of this thing, the close-up postcard, reinforces the tourist gaze and inspires other tourists to travel so that they, too, can fix their gazes and take their own photographs of sacralized sights. The postcard close-up is not unlike the filmic close-up in so far as it represents a consistent set of metonymies or, put differently, a constant set of displacements. In film the close-up enables the spectator to see aspects of a previous world that had already been forgotten. Béla Balázs noted that books, leaflets, newspapers – the written text in general – had alienated the immediate expressions of face and body, and only cinema had the revolutionary power to recuperate that distance. He wrote that film recalls the forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions, and it could make “man visible once again.”86 For Balázs and others, the close-up held a special place in this recuperation because it almost always framed the human face, a mirror of ourselves. Subjects notwithstanding, Mary Ann Doane writes: “The close-up transforms whatever it films into a quasi-tangible thing, producing an intense phenomenological experience of presence, and yet, simultaneously, that deeply experienced entity becomes a sign, a text, a surface that demands to be read. This is, inside or outside of the cinema, the inevitable operation of the face as well.”87 In the close-up, as in the human face, there is a surface that is both sensible and legible. What, then, of the close-up (and implicitly the tourist gaze) embodied by the postcard? What experience of presence does the close-up postcard signify? How does it demand to be read? The close-up postcard is a metonym materialized. It depicts a single image (part) that represents an entire destination (whole). Apart from this one image the rest of the destination is absent. However, the tourist who views and consumes the close-up postcard imagines that it does indeed represent the destination as a whole and one’s entire experience as a tourist. Thus, the destination is displaced and replaced by a single metonymic image in close-up, which enables the postcard to embody a phenomenological experience of presence in spite of its absence. Like the imaginary signifier of the filmic image, the postcard close-up thereby signifies its destination through the dynamic processes of substitution on the part of the tourist.88 Similarly, the most prevalent image form of the contemporary postcard – montage –demands an imaginative leap. While the panorama and close-up embody the veduta and the tourist gaze, respectively, the

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montage corresponds to a gaze on the move. The new technologies of mechanical reproduction connected to these glances no longer seek to arrest this movement but instead embrace the experience of mobile vision. Montage and Travel Glance Montage is the dominant form among postcards today. It juxtaposes multiple, miniaturized images of the destination, most often in a gridlike pattern, although sometimes (albeit rarely) the images overlap as they would in a collage. A typical montage postcard has a larger central image surrounded by smaller ones. For example, the Colosseum anchors a postcard of Rome with the destination’s name, Roma, inscribed above it (figure 2.5). A multitude of smaller images – Saint Peter’s, Piazza Navona, Piazza Venezia, the Trevi Fountain, Castel Sant’Angelo, the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, and the Spanish Steps – surround it in a rectilinear layout. The images comprise a loose combination of close-ups and panoramas so that both veduta and tourist gaze compose the montage. In turn, the montage postcard actualizes another mode of touristic vision in material form: the travel glance. Again, Larsen has theorized this glance “as a product of machine-generated movement of the spectator’s ‘immobile’ body, which subjugates all tourists, willy-nilly, to a spectacle of ephemeral landscape scenes that are only perceptible to the fleeting look of the glance.”89 Put differently, the travel glance accounts for a new mode of mediated, mobilized vision. It is the way one sees from a train window or a bus seat; the body remains immobile, but one moves nonetheless. This is the motorized flânerie of the twenty-first century. Larsen notes that the travel glance is linked to a newer technology of mechanical reproduction, the video camera. Instead of registering a static image, like the photographic camera does, the camcorder records and celebrates movement. It memorializes the “perceptual experience that resembles a (proto)cinematic sensation of mobile landscape images … Both motorized traveler and the cinema spectator can only see ‘representations’ in perpetual elusive motion within the frame of the apparatus; both combine the ‘mobile’ with the ‘virtual’ (representations).”90 In practice, neither the tourist’s body nor the tourist’s eye can orient itself as it moves rapidly across the landscape. Focus is all but impossible. The travel glance is essentially blurry, leaving just an impression of the destination rather than an accurate reflection.

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The montage postcard reproduces the blurred imprint of the travel glance through changes in scale. Montages of a large scale, which consist of only three to six images, are less overwhelming than those of a medium scale, which tend to have between seven and twelve images. Any number more than twelve renders the images so small that they become indiscernible from one another (figures 2.5–2.7). Yet at every scale the eye does not know where to focus on the montage postcard. For example, one postcard shows a hundred images of Rome as if in a mosaic (figure 2.7). The images are so small and juxtaposed so tightly against one another that they become indistinguishable. One cannot see the details of the Colosseum, the Pantheon, or the Roman Forum but merely gets the impression of ancient ruins and baroque churches. As such, the montage postcard incarnates the same sort of visual overload that is experienced when one travels through landscapes at high speed, or what Paul Virilio would call “dromoscopic.”91 The montage and the travel glance embodied by the postcard thus parallel the “intensification of nervous stimulation” characteristic of modernity, that is, the onset of the acceleration age and technological domination.92 This sensory overload and the inability of the eye to focus on any one feature of the montage postcard renders the destination unseen or, in another sense, absent. Yet again the postcard requires another extraordinary operation of substitution on the part of the tourist; she is to believe that the montage stands in for her whole experience as tourist. This singular object signifies an entire trip to Italy, including the préterrain of preparation, the journey to the destination, the actual activities of sightseeing, the blank times and spaces between attractions, shopping, eating, hotels, and the post-terrain of the journey home. It is not a specific destination image but just an impression thereof. Like film, the postcard is more than image, text, language, or narration but is also an imaginary support for the fragmented and ephemeral perception of the tourist as subject. The ways of seeing – veduta, tourist gaze, travel glance – embodied by this material object allow the tourist to imagine herself as self-present and to experience a series of seemingly disconnected images as a whole and unified succession.93 Yet this imaginary totality is predicated upon miscognition, for the tourist’s body never finds its reflection in the postcard, just as it never does in film.94 Instead, the tourist as subject emerges as both illusory and real, an ideological subject that is dynamically constituted in and through the acts of seeing – external to the postcard (tourist as viewer-consumer) and embodied by it (veduta, tourist gaze, travel glance). Somehow, too, amidst these modes of vision and materialized montages, the postcard

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2.5  (above, left), 2.6 (above, right), and 2.7 (facing page) Seen here in various scales, the montage postcard is the material representation of mediated and mobilized modes of touristic vision, or rather the motorized flânerie of the twenty-first century. Postcards reproduced by permission from Millenium ­Editrice, Rome, 2011.

(and the guidebook) leaves a trace of an impression of its destinations – here, an intuitive sense of destination Italy. In sum, postcards and guidebooks are together the objects that manifest the overlapping textual and visual genealogies signified by il dolce far niente, la dolce vita, and il bel paese. It is among the interrelated verbal and visual fragments, imaginative leaps, ephemeral subjectivities, sensory perceptions, and material artefacts that Italy as destination becomes figured in rhetoric and representation. Likewise, guidebooks and postcards make visible specific historical truths: for instance, the need among Italians to abnegate the tragic realities of post–Second World War Italy, or the complicated inheritance of the southern question.

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What is more, these material objects developed in parallel to, and because of, the intertwined histories of mass tourism and the modern Italian state. These histories concern the following chapters and provide the necessary groundwork for a later explanation of the ways in which destination Italy comes to exist as a floating signifier of itself, that is, as an imaginary that spills over its national borders only to be re-imported as simulacra into the very territory it is meant to reproduce.

Practices

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3  Destination Nation: The Grand Tour, Thomas Cook, and the Arrival of Mass Tourism

In the mid-nineteenth century intense political turmoil gripped the Italian peninsula. Dynasties were in flux, and power relations were often tense as territories were contested among the Hapsburgs of AustriaHungary, the papacy, and regional leaders in Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany, the Veneto, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. While such power struggles played out, most inhabitants suffered severe food shortages and worsening living conditions, and this hardship stirred unrest among intellectuals and rural poor alike. Future Risorgimento leaders, like Giuseppe Mazzini and Massimo D’Azeglio, published invectives against the existing political structures and the widespread imbalance of power.1 Their shared animosity for the geopolitical powers set the stage for the first war of Italian independence, in 1848–9, which, to the dismay of Mazzini and D’Azeglio, resulted in a protracted loss to the French troops fighting for Austria-Hungary.2 Indeed, for several months in 1849 the French soldiers laid siege to Rome, where Italian soldiers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi defended the newly founded but ultimately short-lived Roman republic. The city’s highest hill, the Janiculum, became a tattered battleground. The sovereign Aurelian walls were cleaved and pockmarked by bayonet fire. The Villa Aurelia, one of several majestic villas on the hill that also served as headquarters for the Italian resistance, was bombarded by cannon fire and reduced almost entirely to rubble. In the midst of the fighting, Garibaldi cemented his reputation as a military strategist and a charismatic leader by famously crying, “Roma o morte!” (Rome or death!), rather than surrendering to the French. Although Italian forces were defeated here, historians contend that the changes wrought by these first revolutions set into motion an irreversible process of unification

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which, despite deep political and geographical divisions, culminated in the creation of the Italian nation state in 1861.3 The following chapter explores the convergence of the difficult creation of Italy as a unified political entity during the Risorgimento and the arrival of mass tourism on the peninsula to show that the history of the modern Italian state is intimately bound up with the history of tourism and vice versa. The decade following Unification, 1861–71, saw the uneven development of the country’s political infrastructure alongside the rapid growth of a regulated tourist system that conveyed unprecedented numbers of foreign travellers across Europe. This was the age of the democratization of travel.4 Mass tourism in Italy was conceptualized initially as the solution to specific political problems. In 1864 the British tour operator Thomas Cook led the first package tour through northern Italy. He was deeply engaged with the political circumstances of his time and believed that tourism had the power to infuse a sense of morality into politics. For example, he championed the right to leisure for the burgeoning middle class in Britain and gave them opportunities to exercise that right with organized trips to the Scottish Highlands and London’s Crystal Palace. The 1864 Italy trip marked one of Cook’s most significant accomplishments for, in his opinion, it gave middle-class tourists symbolic access to the aesthetic education once reserved for the aristocratic elite. In short, the benefits of the Grand Tour could now be had by all on a limited budget and an abbreviated timetable. Italy, too, held special meaning politically for Cook, who, like many Britons, fervently supported the cause of Italian unification (thanks in no small part to the influence of Mazzini, who had been exiled in London from 1837 to 1848). In the same way that his touristic infrastructure made the Grand Tour accessible to the masses, Cook believed that it could make a politically unified Italy accessible to Italians. He believed that, by enabling Italians to travel their own country, his tourist system would foster sentiments of national belonging among them. He surmised that Italians would take patriotic satisfaction in seeing and experiencing the progress that was made in new railroads, hotels, travel agencies, banknotes, and the urban development of the national capital (which moved from Turin to Florence and finally, in 1870, to Rome). Cook imagined, on the one hand, that destination Italy was a setting for resolving class issues through the democratization of travel and, on the other hand, that his tourist system could be a solution to the seemingly irrational divisions among Italians within their own country.

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In such ways, not only were the practices of mass tourism (inaugurated and operationalized by Thomas Cook in the 1860s) inspired by the Grand Tour, but also they formatively connected the modern Italian state to Italy as destination. Model Voyages: The Grand Tour The Grand Tour of the eighteenth century was unquestionably the most important phenomenon that shaped Cook’s Italian tours, and its influence is still evident among present-day touring patterns in Italy. What were once requisite sojourns in Rome, Florence, and Venice are still mandatory stops for contemporary tourists. At its most basic the Grand Tour took the form of a multi-year journey that was undertaken by young, wealthy men who were either aristocrats or members of the bourgeoisie, predominantly from Britain and Germany. The goal was an aesthetic education, and Italy served as both the fount of inspiration and the finishing school for budding artists and aristocratic gentlemen.5 According to Christopher Hibbert, the Italian journey was recognized as an “ideal means of imparting taste and knowledge in the mind of a youth.”6 There were so many of these young men on tour that the community they formed emerged as something of an independent, wandering academy, easily the largest in Europe.7 The Grand Tour was known by many names (for example, voyage en Italie, viaggio in Italia, Italienische Reise), and its golden age lasted throughout the 1700s, effectively ending when Napoleon invaded northern Italy in 1796.8 Routes and itineraries were well established, as were travel schedules. Grand Tourists were encouraged to plan their trips around particular events, such as Carnival in Venice, the Octave of the Sacrament in Bologna, and Holy Week in Rome. The route from Britain to Italy typically went through France, where there was usually an obligatory stop in Paris before the journey over the Alps into Piedmont or Lombardy, or via passage by sea from Marseilles to the Ligurian coast. Within the Italian peninsula travellers normally followed two popular routes: one beginning in Milan and the other in Genoa. The first proceeded south from Milan to Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. The second headed east from Genoa to Pisa and Florence and later to Rome, Naples, and Venice. Of course, there were variations on all of these routes, and for most travellers Naples marked the southernmost extreme of the tour.9 A few intrepid travellers (most famously Goethe) travelled further south, most frequently to Sicily; yet this was more the

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exception than the rule. Most stopped in Naples, content to view Mount Vesuvius and what were then the recently unearthed ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Travel was done in short distances and mostly by diligence (vetturini) for the dusty, tortuous roads did not make for comfortable long-distance travel. Grand Tourists and their horses and attendants often needed to rest, and they typically did so at less-than-genteel establishments across the Italian countryside. Guidebooks and travel accounts make it clear that being robbed was chief among the travellers’ concerns. Some aristocrats went so far as to travel incognito to avoid becoming targets for brigands. Among the other hazards of the road, Grand Tourists encountered inconsistent customs and passport controls (often requiring bribes), carriage breakdowns and accidents, and recurring stomach problems owing to bad water and food.10 Not only did Grand Tourists share the common experiences of being on the road, but they also understood Italy to be a place that stimulated and satiated all of the senses. One of the most famous Grand Tourists, Edward Gibbon, who wrote the landmark Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ca 1788) after an inspired tour, praised the profusion of pleasure and knowledge that he experienced there: “I do not pretend to say that there are no disagreeable things in [Italy] … but how amply is a traveler repaid for those little mortifications by the pleasure and knowledge he finds in almost every place.”11 Natural and artistic beauty stimulated his vision above all else, and, in the same letter as above, Gibbon described the viewing of art as constructive of his aesthetic tastes: “I flatter myself, that the works of the greatest artists, which I have continually before my eyes, have already begun to form my taste for the fine arts.”12 Goethe, too, wrote in his famed Italianiesche Reise (Italian journey; ca 1788) that the visions of Naples infiltrated his mind and prevented him from expressing the city otherwise: “Every time I wish to write words, visual images come up, images of the fruitful countryside, the open sea, the islands veiled in a haze, the smoking mountain, etc., and I lack the mental organ which could describe them.”13 Put differently, Goethe found himself caught between visual and verbal fragments. Indeed, visions of Italy were sublime and picturesque in the eighteenth century, sometimes even grotesque. Few tourists went without witnessing some form of public execution or prisoner torture there, and, according to Hibbert, these horrendous acts provided a shockingly visceral and yet visual counterpoint to the aesthetic beauty of landscape.14

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Destination Italy stimulated the visceral among the other senses, too, be it through culinary offerings, sexual pleasures, or sundry things. For example, Thomas Nugent described the country’s abhorrent cuisine in his popular 1749 guidebook. His palate (and digestive system) apparently suffered from tasting the likes of boiled snails, fried frogs, kites, magpies, and, most offensively, “buffalo’s flesh [that] is black, stinking, and hard.”15 Likewise, Grand Tourists repeatedly indulged in the pleasures of the flesh while on tour. In particular, Venice gained notoriety for its skilled and alluring courtesans.16 Richard Lassels, a Catholic priest, warned of Venice in his 1670 guidebook, The Voyage of Italy: “Others desire to go into Italy, onely because they heare there are fine Curtisanes in Venice … these men travel a whole month together, to Venice, for a nights lodgeing with an impudent woman. And thus by false ayming at breeding abroad, they returne with those diseases which hinder them from breeding at home.”17 Few of these young men heeded Lassels’s advice, and most indulged in sensual pleasures, some more formally than others. Many Grand Tourists hired prostitutes, others officially took on mistresses, and still others acted on repressed homosexual desires.18 Female Grand Tourists, who were quite rare, tended to engage in cicisbeship, or the arrangement in which a married woman had a male companion who acted as her social escort (and sometimes lover).19 Yet sex was just one part of the myriad experiences of Italy. The visceral pleasures (and pain) of the Grand Tour secured destination Italy’s cachet as a land of the senses. Even as the Tour drew to a close at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and its demographics shifted from European aristocrats to wealthy American bourgeois, Italy still retained this reputation. When Thomas Cook arrived with his first organized tour of Italy in 1864, the country existed not just as a superlative aesthetic space but also as a vivid sensorium that had been brought alive by the travelling practices of the Grand Tour. And it was Cook, a Baptist minister on a touristic mission, who integrated the nationalist politics of the newly unified Italian state into the aesthetic and sensory contours of Italy as destination. Thomas Cook and the New Voyage to Italy Unlike the Grand Tour, in which tourists lingered for months in a single city, Thomas Cook’s first organized tour of northern Italy in July 1864 was unprecedented in scale and speed; his fifty tourists rushed through

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cities in a matter of hours. In the span of just ten days this tour covered some three thousand miles, departing from Como and including Florence, Pisa, Genoa, and Turin (and several small towns in between). The arrival of Cook and his organized tour signalled a new era that has been given little consideration in the historiography of modern Italy, that is, the remarkable intensification and acceleration of mass tourism that developed alongside the political formation of the Italian state. In the decade immediately following Unification in 1861, tens of thousands of tourists (most of them British) made extensive use of Cook’s all-inclusive system of hotel, meal, and railway coupons to travel the peninsula. This infrastructure supported increasing numbers of tourists, who in turn experienced and understood Italy to be unified, that is, expressive of both a singular culture and a political identity. This understanding, and the perpetuation thereof, can be attributed to Cook himself, whose ultimate goal was to put tourism in the service of unifying the Italian state. Yet Cook was so successful with his tourist system that, despite all patriotic intentions, Italy as destination eclipsed the Italian political state in both structural organization and popular imagination. Indeed, the stereotypes that comprise destination Italy – as a space of leisure and aesthetics – remain dominant understandings of Italy today. Pious Vocation, Package Vacation In 1840 Thomas Cook thought little about Italy. At the time, the founder of modern mass tourism was a cabinetmaker by trade who also earned a small income through his work as a preacher and publisher of temperance pamphlets in the English Midlands (figure 3.1). After a long walk to a temperance meeting in Leicester one afternoon Cook decided to charter a train to transport like-minded advocates to their next meeting. This first excursion on 5 July 1841 proved so popular that Cook spent the next three summers chartering trains and organizing trips to Temperance Society gatherings, and so began his career as a tour operator.20 In the summer of 1845 Cook’s scope changed from temperance to leisure after he arranged a tour to the Liverpool seaside. Tickets for this trip were sold out in days, prompting Cook to organize a similar one just two weeks later. The following summer Cook led some four hundred tourists to the Scottish Highlands. The sheer numbers travelling with him were without precedent, and local inhabitants were often

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3.1  Portrait of Thomas Cook (1864), who is considered by many to be the founder of modern mass tourism. Image reproduced by permission from the Thomas Cook Company Archive, Peterborough, UK.

stunned by their first contact with such a crowd. Lynne Withey writes, “The prospect of such a large group of tourists descending upon Glas­ gow en masse was so novel that a crowd of gawking well-wishers met them at the train station. Later they were entertained with a parade and party at City Hall.”21 It was this Scotland excursion that prompted Cook to refocus his vocation entirely on vacation. In the 1850s Cook expanded his business throughout England and the British Isles. He gained national repute in 1851 by organizing trips to the Crystal Palace at London’s Great Exhibition. Some six million people visited the exhibition, and Cook was responsible for conveying

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165,000 of them there.22 That same year he started a weekly newspaper called The Excursionist, which codified the organized tour as an established activity of the Victorian middle class. In addition to promoting tours and excursions, the newspaper became a pulpit for Cook, who, true to his roots as a minister, espoused his philosophies on travel in it, often reflexively situating himself within the history of tourism. Given the frequency with which it was published, The Excursionist provides a rich historical record of Cook’s activities as well as his personal views on travel. For example, Cook penned an article titled “Past, Present, and Future. Pleasant Memories” for the 26 May 1859 edition. It was one of his more philosophical musings in which he extolled travel as a spiritual route to God, perhaps even more so than via temperance. Travel, he wrote, has the power to “unite man to man” and, more important, man to God:23 The social delights, the formulation of new and extended friendships, the expansion of thought, the grasp of information, the destruction of narrow prejudices, the diffusive influence of benevolence, the opening fields of usefulness – in a word, all that unites man to man, and contributes to the love of species and of country, is associated with the memories of eighteen summers of Excursion engagements. From year to year, abundant evidence is afforded that these sentiments and feelings are the natural and common results of associated travel … But there are other fruits of travel of more exalted interest and value than those of social intercourse. “Nature with open volume stands, To spread her Maker’s promise abroad”; And it is when we are enabled to “look through nature up to nature’s God” that we realize the highest of human attainments. And who can wander amidst scenes of natural grandeur without perceiving the voice – “the still small voice” – of the spirit of the Great Creator and Preserver of all the magnificence of earth?

Clearly Cook believed that travel led to spiritual connection. He not only described modern tourism as a form of Christian pilgrimage but also implied that it could be missionized (not a surprising step in logic for a Baptist minister).24 In Cook’s opinion, tourists could “spread [their] Maker’s promise abroad” and in such ways connect themselves (and others) to a more divine Christian purpose. He saw himself as an

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altruistic facilitator of this spiritual pilgrimage and mission, a man who helped to unite others with God by providing access to travel. These self-declared altruistic intentions were the subject of another article written by Cook for the 19 October 1861 edition of The Excursion­ ist. Conscious of his place in tourism history, Cook positioned himself in this text as central to the revolution in transport technology as well as the democratization of travel in general:25 What a change in the views, feelings, and pursuits of men, has the last twenty-one years produced! The Railway has been one of the greatest of modern teachers, and lessons of locomotion have ranked with the most powerful agencies in their practical results. It is nearly twenty-one years since the thought of applying the great powers and facilities of the railways to the advancement of the Temperance Movement first came into our mind, and soon resolved itself into a definite project. Since then the idea has expanded and diffused itself into a thousand shapes and varieties, until we are now led to regard Excursions and Tours as amongst the settled institutions of civilized life. Our vocation – be it profession or trade, however designated – has been a novel one, quite unpremeditated, and almost unparalleled. Others have followed in the wake of our first movements, and have acquired positions more advantageous, locally, than our own; but none have so entirely thrown their souls and energies into the Tourist system. In the wide range of Tourist enterprise and travel, there is not another Excursion Manager who has so entirely placed himself at the service of the travelling public as the conductor of this paper.

In this passage Cook presented himself in the language of Christian martyrdom: not only had he thrown his soul completely into the tourism industry, but also he had committed his existential being to the service of others, the travelling public. Interestingly, Cook’s tone turns messianic, too, as he figures himself the man who capitalized on a technological invention (the railway) to organize an ideological project (tourism) that became a fundamental part of civilized life. In other words, tourism became synonymous with civilization under Cook’s watch. By extending that logic, if excursions and tours were now “settled institutions of civilized life,” then Cook had succeeded in a civilizing mission. It was a mission not unlike the civilizing missions that served to justify the projects of European colonialism taking hold across Africa and Asia at the same time. Thus, Cook figuratively brought

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civilization to tourists by institutionalizing it within daily life, much like colonizers sought to bestow the same upon colonized subjects elsewhere. With tourism firmly established as a commercial industry in Britain, Cook turned his sights to the Continent in the 1860s and decided that his first international trip would be to Paris. Since 1861 was also the first year in which British citizens no longer needed passports to travel to France, Cook negotiated a return ticket from London to Paris with the appropriate railway and ferry companies, priced at one pound. The trip was an astounding success, with 1,625 tourists taking part in the six-day excursion.26 By 1863 Cook was running multiple tours to France each year and had expanded his Continental operations into Switzerland. But his true “dream of months, and hope of years” was an excursion over the Alps to the destination of the Grand Tour itself: Italy.27 Italy, a Dream Realized According to those who journeyed on the first organized excursion in Italy in July 1864, the trip was a terrific success: “During the whole tour of nearly 3,000 miles, embracing so many different kinds of conveyance, scarcely a hitch happed in any of the arrangements. The published programme was worked out most admirably, and such a tour has never been accomplished by so large a party before.”28 Cook’s inaugural Italian tour was unparalleled in speed and distance. On the first day the group was up at 4:00 a.m. to begin the journey over the treacherous pass of Saint Gotthard in Switzerland and finally reached Bellinzona by evening. Over the next eight days these tourists sailed on Lake Como, marvelled at the Milanese duomo, stood next to the leaning towers in Bologna, and toured all of Florence. In Milan Cook noted that his large party of English tourists astonished the locals. Of course, not everyone was stupefied by these tourists; for instance, the many British expatriates who considered themselves holdovers from the Grand Tour reacted vehemently against the “Cook-ites” who invaded “their” country. One of these expats, Charles Lever (writing under the pseudonym Cornelius O’Dowd), proclaimed: “I have already met three ‘flocks’ and anything so uncouth I never saw before – the men mostly elderly, dreary, sad-looking, evidently bored and tired, the women somewhat younger, travel tossed, and crumpled, but intensely lively, wide awake and facetious. The cities of Italy are deluged

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with droves of these creatures, for they never separate, and you see them, 40 in number, pouring along a street with their director – now in the front – now in the rear – circling around them like a sheep dog and really the process is as like herding as may be.”29 Cook’s tourists moved across the country in a hurried deluge. Withey notes that, to cover so much distance in so little time, “it seems to have been a cardinal principle on Cook’s tours never to start on any journey later than 6:00 a.m.”30 Consider the travel that was done on the final three days of the trip. On 19 July 1864 the group departed Florence in the morning by railway, and, reaching Pisa in the afternoon, they took a break to climb the city’s famed leaning tower. The group then reboarded the train and headed to Livorno, where they arrived in the evening to have a hasty dinner and glance about town before boarding a steamer bound for Genoa. They spent the following day sightseeing in Genoa and left for Turin on the evening train. The group’s final day in Italy, 21  July, was spent sightseeing in Turin before they headed back to England via the pass at Mont Cenis early the next morning. While the tour was intended as a sort of Grand Tour for the middle classes, its frenetic pace was far from that of the years-long sojourn of its predecessor. Yet this first Italian tour was an unabashed success, so much so that it inspired another one a few months later in September 1864. In the months that followed, Cook expanded the tour to include Rome and Naples, and several trips went out over the next year (figure 3.2). By 1866 Cook had written a guidebook and inaugurated two more annual trips in addition to his regular excursions, which would prove to be among his most popular: an Easter trip to Rome and a Great Autumnal Excursion to Switzerland and Italy. In all, Cook’s first tour established a way for tourists to tour destination Italy en masse, that is, to compress all of the Grand Tour into a week-long itinerary. In the following decade so many British tourists travelled on Cook’s itineraries that daily departures from London to Italy were required to meet the demand.31 By 1874, just ten years after that inaugural excursion, Italy had become firmly ensconced as one of Cook’s premier tourist destinations. Mass Tourism and Italian Unification In the years following his first tour Thomas Cook grew profoundly aware of Italian politics and became particularly concerned with the fate of the newly unified Italian state. He often referenced the Risorgimento in his Excursionist articles and pondered how tourism could ameliorate

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3.2  Thomas Cook, sixth from the right (seated), poses with a group of his tourists on a trip to Pompeii in 1868. Image reproduced by permission from the Thomas Cook Company Archive, Peterborough, UK.

the economic and political difficulties that stemmed from Unification.32 Indeed, there was much British sympathy for the Italian cause, for a unified Italy was seen as a defence against other potential imperial powers in Europe. No one in Cook’s circle, it seems, wanted the rise of another Napoleon or Austro-Hungarian empire. Withey notes that in most British travellers of that era “the Italians inspired sympathy as a people oppressed, whether by the Papacy, Austria, Sardinia, or one of the several petty dukedoms … Travelers blamed the Italians’ poverty and disinclination to work on corrupt governments – which exercised arbitrary rule and taxed their subjects excessively – and on the Catholic Church, which siphoned off money from the people to support an excessive number of priests and decorate already overly decorated churches.”33 Cook certainly felt likewise. After a preliminary scouting trip to Italy, Cook described with a sombre tone in The Excursionist a memorial to fallen Italian soldiers at Magenta. These soldiers, he wrote, had died in battle against the Austrians in 1859:34

Destination Nation 95 The Railways which connect Turin and Milan form a junction at magenta, which could not be passed without the recollection of one of the great events of the late war of Italian Independence. As the train approaches Magenta station, there is on the right of the line, a monument recently erected in commemoration of the great battle that was fought there; and on the opposite side of the line, immediately facing the station, is a large grave where thousands of the slain were buried. The ground is sunk for a considerable distance, and two or three plain wooden crosses were all that stood to indicate the great cemetery. Mingled emotions of sorrow for the dead and joy for the resurrection of Italy[’s] social and political life, are awakened by the monuments of Magenta.

In this passage Cook adopted a patriotic tenor that echoed that of Risorgimento leaders like Mazzini and D’Azeglio. He too engaged the rhetoric of resurgence – indeed risorgere (to resurge) is the very root of Risorgimento (resurgence) – to describe the renewed “social and political life” of the newly unified Italian state. Cook was, in fact, a staunch supporter of this new state.35 Likewise, Cook also revealed his Christian faith in this quote. By pairing the death of Italian soldiers with the resurrection of the state, he implicitly applied the Christian tenets of death and resurrection to understand both his visit to Magenta and the Italian political sphere. Cook vehemently opposed the doctrines and institutions of the Roman Catholic Church. He actively supported King Victor Emmanuel II and the Liberal government when the Church took measures to destabilize the political state with its 1871 non expedit policy, which both prohibited Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections and excommunicated all who participated in state politics.36 Nowhere did Cook issue a clearer or more passionate invective against the Church than in his August 1864 article in The Excursionist:37 It was also a rare privilege to be permitted to mingle with a noble, ingenious and vivacious people, who have but recently emerged, and are not yet quite free from the taints of mental and political bondage – to see these noble Italian men and women walking forth in the pure air of political freedom, though thousands are yet the victims of priestly domination and besotted superstition. No one can look upon the condition of the Italian people without mingled feelings of joy and pain. The ecclesiastical system of Italy would appear to an intelligent observer at once the glory and the curse of that favoured land. Art and wealth have lavished their treasures on gorgeous temples, and jolly pampered priests contrast most strikingly

96  The Beautiful Country with the evident poverty and degradation of devotees and beggars. Above these hordes stand out in bold relief a noble race of intelligent educated men and women, who, though they may bear the infidel brand, are the real regenerators of Italy. In the social aspects of society, Milan and Turin contrast strangely with such places as Bologna and Florence, where we witness exhibitions of priestly domination and superstitious abjection of the most distressing character, and we felt as though we could but weep over the abominations and blasphemies of their rites and ceremonies. Never, never can Italy be really free till the light of Truth and Christian simplicity prevails over such solemn fooleries as it was our lot to witness in the streets and squares of Florence, where bloody crucifixes were paraded about by rude boys, and thousands fell on their knees before ridiculous figures and effigies of Virgin and child.

The Catholic Church, according to Cook, held the Italian state and its citizens hostage with spiritual demands and irrational superstitions. He smarted at the Church’s appalling hypocrisy, too, contrasting the avarice of its “jolly priests” and the excesses of its “gorgeous temples” with the poverty, degradation, and dispossession suffered by “devotees and beggars,” or the very people whom the Church purported to help. In such ways, the Church, as a structure of complete inequality, limited the political agency of citizens in the newly formed Italian state. Cook intimated that the Church targeted anyone who threatened its power by branding them as infidels, a clear foreshadowing of the non expedit policy to come. For him it was imperative that Church and State remain separate and that “intelligent educated men and women,” not ecclesiastics, run the new Italian government. While it is true that the political future of Italy concerned Cook enormously, his priorities always remained with his tourists. This is clear from his description of Turin (which had just lost its status as Italy’s capital in 1864) wherein Cook emphasized the city’s excellent touristic potential despite its weakened political status:38 turin has lost its resident King, its Court and Parliament, but not its public spirit, as works of great magnitude are still progressing, including the building of new streets and piazzas; and strangest of all seeming anomalies, a new House of Parliament is in course of erection. It is really pleasant to observe the hopefulness and cheerfulness of the people, under bereavements that could not fail to cause innumerable and deep regrets. The city is certainly inconveniently situated for a Central Government, at the

Destination Nation 97 corner of the kingdom, otherwise it seems to be the best metropolitan city of Italy for purposes of government. The streets, squares, and buildings are far superior to those of Florence, and apart from the association of history and artistic fame, it is a pleasanter place than most of the chief cities of Italy. The King is said to be still ardently attached to Turin and the surrounding country. If Turin is a widow, she is certainly a cheerful one, and we hope yet to have many opportunities of conducting pleasant visitors to gaze upon her attractions, not the least agreeable of which are the comforts of the excellent Hotel Feder, where these notes and observations are recorded.

Cook lamented Turin’s loss of its monarchy and parliament but noted the “hopefulness and cheerfulness” of the city and its inhabitants. He likened Turin to a happy widow, which in a certain way linked the city to a common literary heritage of Italy expressed in the famous lines of poets like Dante and Leopardi of an “Italia vedova e sola” (Italy widowed and alone).39 For Cook, Turin’s capital improvements made it not just “the best metropolitan city … for purposes of government” but also a “pleasanter place” for tourists. Its new streets, piazzas, and buildings comprised an infrastructure that facilitated the practice of tourism, the most recent example being that of the “excellent Hotel Feder.” In this vein of touristic praxis Cook was not satisfied to simply comment on Italian politics in The Excursionist; instead he set out to live them as a tourist. In 1866, for instance, he organized a trip to Venice to personally see “the Queen of the Adriatic emancipated from the depressing yoke of Austrian domination,” and “the flag of freedom wave from her towers and pinnacles.”40 When the Austrians turned over control in August 1866, Cook led a band of fifty tourists to greet King Victor Emanuel II and to participate in the festivities:41 Venice will have a carnival of rejoicing such as she never has for ages realized, when the Quadrilateral is given up to the King of Italy, and the Queen of the Adriatic is released from her bondage. We shall then expect to see the gondolas wearing brighter hues than they have been wont to assume, and to hear the cheerful song of the famed gondoliers. We only wish the Austrian troops could be made to carry away with them all the mosquitoes that have so sorely plagued the visitors to Venice; but we would rather have another fight with those midnight marauders than lose the opportunity of viewing, whilst the tricolour still waves, the joy of emancipated Venice.

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Cook and his group hurried to Venice and arrived in early September 1866; however, they miscalculated the date of Victor Emmanuel’s visit and returned to London without experiencing the foretold “carnival of rejoicing.” Never one to be stymied by bad timing, Cook quickly organized a return trip: “Another trip to Venice was very hastily determined upon, and in a few days after returning with the September party, Mr. Cook started again with a few friends, resolved to be present and join in the acclamations of welcome to Victor Emmanuel. After waiting for ten days for his Majesty’s arrival, the object of the trip was realized on the 7th of November – a day which will never be effaced from the history of the newly united and consolidated Italian kingdom.”42 Cook joined in the praises to the king in Saint Mark’s Square, and, by taking part in such a momentous occasion, he and his tourists also symbolically demonstrated their support for Unification.43 What is more, Cook believed that his company and the tourist system it put into place could facilitate and even ameliorate these uneven political processes. He wanted Italians to get to know unified Italy through travel, and to do so through his touristic infrastructure. In an 1891 letter to The Times newspaper a Cook’s traveller by the name of Charles H.L. Woodd described the way in which Cook made it easier for Italians to visit one another with standardized train tickets and hotel coupons. According to him, some Italians also believed that Cook played a critical role in unifying the state:44 In reference to Messrs. Cook and Son, the excursionists, it may be of interest to some to hear what an intelligent Italian once said to me some years ago, when travelling in Italy. He said that Messrs. Cook and Son had done more to bring about the unity of the Italian nation than any military or political influence, through their introduction of the railway circular tourist ticket, which encouraged and enabled an inhabitant of Turin to visit Rome and Naples, and a dweller at Naples to see Florence, Bologna, and Turin, finding as a result that the inhabitants were all of one tongue and family, the intercourse at once destroying the petty jealousies and hereditary feuds of towns, small States, and communities, and leading to the formation of one nation and a “United Italy.”

Woodd’s letter provides a rare glimpse into the Italian reception of Cook’s tours, albeit a glimpse filtered through the bias of an English traveller. In its citation of “an intelligent Italian” who had extolled

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Cook’s role in the Risorgimento, this passage hints that at least some Italians reinforced Cook’s belief that tourism could have positive repercussions in the political sphere of unified Italy. According to said Italian, tourism’s ability to connect people as well as to diffuse rigid understandings of difference (that is, “destroying … petty jealousies and hereditary feuds”) did more to catalyse Unification than did any other circumstance. In economics, too, Cook attempted to bolster the Italian state. By introducing a widely dispersed coupon system, Cook helped to stabilize the burgeoning Italian economy not only by increasing the revenues from tourism but also by expanding the circulation of Italy’s new currency, the lira. One of the biggest challenges facing post-1861 Italy was the reconciliation of disparate monetary policies between regional banks and the equivalent valuation of the currencies already in circulation (for example, the ducato of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the lira pontificia of the Papal States, and the scudo of Emilia-Romagna). Accord­ ing to Michele Fratianni and Franco Spinelli, the new Italian state suffered a series of banking crises and monetary shocks in the decade after Unification, even as the new paper form of the lira italiana was put into daily use in 1874.45 In that same decade Cook introduced an alternative and more stable touristic currency system that consisted of Cook’s circular tickets, circular notes, and hotel and meal coupons (figures 3.3–3.5). While he implemented similar systems in the United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland, none took hold quite as rapidly as did the one in Italy. Cook intended that foreign tourists and Italians alike use his tickets and coupons, although the former were more likely than the latter to use them. First, the circular tickets (also called “tourist tickets” or “travel coupons”) could be used on almost all Italian railways. Similar to a presentday Eurail pass, these tickets allowed travel by train (or select steamship) for a prescribed number of days along predetermined routes. Cook conceptualized this ticket system as early as the summer of 1864, at which time he was already in talks with Italian officials to inaugurate it in Italy. He wrote of these negotiations in The Excursionist:46 “We wish to see how the arrangements work out, and especially to test the spirit of the various companies interested. Such a trip is a novelty to the Italian officials and the Italian people, and we want to see how they are satisfied with our proposals. On our return we hope to be able to submit something like a report of first progress, and see if any improvements can be made in the arrangements.” The trip certainly did work out as

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3.3, 3.4, and 3.5  On the facing page (3.3 and 3.4): a Cook’s circular ticket (1877) and a Cook’s £5 circular note (1870s) the predecessor to the modern-day traveller’s cheque; above (3.5): daily meal coupons (ca 1880). Images reproduced by permission from the Thomas Cook Company Archive, Peterborough, UK.

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did the coupon arrangements, for one year later Cook’s circular tickets were widely accepted throughout northern Italy.47 By 1868 the tickets were being accepted as far south as Rome, Naples, and Pompeii.48 And by 1870 these tickets enjoyed such great success that Cook felt confident enough to proclaim his “mastery of all the details of Italian travel”:49 For six years we have been exploring, and repeatedly visiting Italy with a view to a mastery of all the details of Italian travel, and we speak with no egotistical vanity when we affirm the entire command of our acquaintance with the travelling arrangements of the country. Our Tickets are specially prepared for our Agency by the Company of High Italy, and are printed both in the English and Italian languages for the twofold convenience of English travellers and Italian Railway servants. These Tickets can be had for individuals or small parties travelling alone, as well as for those who choose to accompany our tourist parties under personal management.

Typically tickets were printed in booklets of four or five, and tourists carried a series of them depending on their destinations. They were most often bought in the United Kingdom; however, by 1869 they could be purchased on the peninsula as well. Descriptions and advertisements in The Excursionist show that Cook’s circular tickets were available for more than twenty tours of various Italian regions by the early 1870s. For example, a traveller equipped with a Cook’s circular ticket could take one month to travel from London to Paris, Milan, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Civitavecchia, Livorno, Genoa, Alessandria, and Turin, and back to London again, all for £16 in first class or £13 in second class. By and large, these tickets emerged as a popular, stable, and widely accepted voucher system for travel throughout Italy, even as the country suffered the throes of economic instability in the decades that followed Unification.50 Second, Cook designed a series of hotel coupons to complement circular tickets, which could be exchanged for lodging and meals at designated accommodations. Again, these coupons were bundled in books of four or five, each valid for either one night’s lodging or a single meal. In practice, tourists would redeem a circular ticket to travel from Florence to Pisa, for example, and then cash in a hotel coupon at a predetermined hotel, which in the case of Pisa was the Hotel de Londres. In addition to lodging, this coupon provided the tourist with dinner and breakfast. The influence of this hotel coupon system grew quickly, and by 1869 more than twenty hotels, from as far north as Turin to as far south as Brindisi, accepted them as valid currency.

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Third, Cook introduced the circular note in 1872, which is often considered the precursor to the modern traveller’s cheque. These paper notes could be changed at designated hotels, banks, and ticket agents for Italian lire at a predetermined exchange rate. As the Italian economy struggled to get on its feet, Cook’s circular notes created demand for its new national currency and, in so doing, helped to legitimize it. While many British tourists chose to carry Cook’s tickets, coupons, and circular notes instead of money, when they did pay in cash, it was almost always in Italian lire, which they acquired after exchanging their circular notes. As Cook’s tourists travelled throughout Italy, not only did they create a demand for the lira, but they also circulated it at breakneck speed. There is a paucity of exact statistics as to how many circular tickets, hotel coupons, and circular notes Cook actually issued in the early years of his Italian tours. One might surmise that the hundreds of travellers departing daily from London to the Italian peninsula were using circular tickets. As for hotel coupons, Cook claims to have issued forty thousand of them for use in Italy during their inaugural year, 1869. There is unfortunately little information about the use of Cook’s ticket system by Italians at the time.51 Prior to 1874, coupons were only available at specific hotels through appointed agents, who were usually British expatriates. After 1874, however, Italians would have had greater access to these coupons thanks to the opening of Cook’s tourist ­offices in several major Italian cities. The first opened in 1874 at Piazza di Spagna in Rome and was followed by another in Naples in 1880. By 1897 Cook had offices in Florence, Milan, Turin, Venice, Brindisi, and Genoa, as well as Rome and Naples. Indeed, the extraordinary success of Cook’s tours in the decades following Unification prompted the Italian government to join forces with the company in 1880. Italian officials approached John Cook – the founder’s son who was now head of the family business – with an unprecedented offer as the younger Cook was looking to establish tours in India. These officials convinced him to route his India tour overland so that instead of sailing to the subcontinent via the Straits of Gibraltar as was most common, Cook’s tourists would travel through the Italian peninsula and depart from Brindisi instead.52 Cook would receive a commission from the Italian government on all passengers booked from Brindisi to India, and the developing Italian economy would benefit from additional tourism profits that otherwise would have been lost. This deal brokered between Cook and the Italian government attested to the significant economic value attached to tourism in the context

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of the unified Italian state. Since 1861, in the mere arc of twenty years, Cook’s tourist system had propelled the construction of touristic infrastructure like railways and hotels; had established routes and itineraries for large tour groups; had inaugurated a coupon system that stabilized the national currency; and in general had designated Italy as a favoured tourist destination in Europe. Thus, by the turn of the century, more than two decades after Italian forces had retreated from the Janiculum hill and the first war of Italian independence had ended in defeat in 1849, the unified Italian state and Italy as destination came to mutually coexist. It was a convergence not simply catalysed but generated by the tourist system that Cook had inaugurated. In these decades, too, destination Italy actually proved to be a more stable imaginary than the political state. Whereas the national capital moved three times between 1861 and 1870, tourist circuits solidified in this era and established cities like Rome, Florence, and Venice as requisite attractions on an increasingly travelled tourist track. In such ways, Italy as destination proved to be a stabilizing foil to the unstable state in these decades, in terms of both popular opinion (that is, the case for Italian sovereignty) and civic governance (that is, currency circulation). In the decades to follow, the complex political potentials inherent in such an articulation between Italian political and touristic imaginaries would become the focal points of an emerging domestic tourism industry: first, with the Touring Club Italiano at the fin de siècle and, later, more ominously, with the Fascist regime.

4 Tours of Duty: Touring Clubs, Fascist Agencies, and the Domestic Tourism Industry

On his first trip to the southern regions of Basilicata and Calabria the founder of the Touring Club Italiano (TCI), Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, stopped to admire a marble obelisk dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Risorgimento’s greatest hero. The monument, currently located in the town of Soveria Mannelli, still bears the inscription of Garibaldi’s words that inspired Bertarelli back in 1896: “Dite al mondo che, alla testa dei miei bravi calabresi, qui ho disarmato dodicimila soldati borbonici” ­­ (Tell the world that, at the head of my brave Calabrians, here I disarmed twelve thousand Bourbon soldiers). Garibaldi made this statement during his famed Spedizione dei Mille (Expedition of the Thousand), an audacious military campaign in 1860 in which one thousand volunteer soldiers not only defeated superior Bourbon forces and caused the dissolution of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies but also became the event that constituted the founding narrative of Italian unification.1 The monument gave Bertarelli great pause. He spontaneously relived the expedition, picturing himself alongside those celebrated redshirts (as Garibaldi’s troops were known), travelling from Sicily up through Calabria and helping to make Italy on the spot. Bertarelli wrote that the result of the battle near Soveria Mannelli, “È l’Italia che si fa … in questo bosco, in questo luogo” (It is Italy that is made … in this forest, in this place).2 That Bertarelli imagined himself to be a redshirt not only positioned him within the regnant cult of Garibaldi but also revealed his agency in the mythification of the Risorgimento. Yet that is not all; this experience spurred Bertarelli’s conviction that tourism could unite Italy, as Garibaldi did, by amplifying connections between the local and the national. This vision crystallized in one of his unpublished essays, now housed in the Touring Club Italiano archive:

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“Il nostro turista può farsi un’idea delle soluzioni possibili di molte questioni nazionali fondamentali, comprendere e valutare certe manifestazioni locali in tutti i campi della vita, apprezzare i caratteri delle popolazioni, contribuire alla fusione di tutte le regioni della Patria unica” (Our tourist can get an idea of the possible solutions to many fundamental national questions, understand and evaluate certain local events in all fields of life, appreciate the character of populations, and contribute to the fusion of all the regions of the unified Patria).3 Bertarelli believed that Italians as tourists could metaphorically become modernday redshirts and quite literally unite Italy. Put another way, Bertarelli’s statement implicitly merged the formation of the Italian political state (the result of the Risorgimento) with the imaginary of destination Italy (the result of touristic representations and practices). An Italian domestic tourism sector thus began to take shape at the end of the nineteenth century, some three decades after Thomas Cook had made his inaugural excursion to northern Italy and brought with him the hurried deluge of tourists that would only intensify over time. Similar to the Cook-ites and the Grand Tourists before them, upper- and middle-class Italians like Bertarelli began to travel in their own country at this moment, often along the same routes as did their foreign predecessors. While the state government was cursorily involved in tourism planning early on, it was the autonomous Touring Club Italiano, founded in 1894, that made the first real strides to codify and institutionalize the practice of mass tourism among Italians. The club was based in Milan, and accordingly both its leadership and members were from northern Italy, the regions of Lombardy and Pied­ mont in particular. Italy’s domestic tourism sector hence developed from the north to the south, not unlike the process of Unification itself. While men like Bertarelli espoused tourism’s capacity to unify Italy, the unspoken discourse that subtended these inaugural efforts to organize tourism was that of the southern question. The TCI’s early policies and excursions revealed less a goal of fusing all regions into a unified political state but more an aim to integrate the south into destination Italy. In this way Bertarelli’s first tours to Basilicata and Calabria were more like Garibaldi’s expedition than he could have even anticipated. In this last decade of the nineteenth century, then, Italians who toured Italy as destination were predominantly from the north, while the southerners emigrated overseas. According to Mark Choate, between 1880 and 1915 thirteen million Italians emigrated to North and South America and elsewhere around the world, which was the largest

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recorded emigration from any country in modern history.4 Often these emigrants were among the most destitute, disenfranchised, and dispossessed who left to seek work abroad with the hope of sending remittances back home. The south was the locus of this mass migration, which began from Basilicata in the 1870s and continued from Calabria, Abruzzo, Campania, and Sicily in the mid-1890s.5 Choate argues that these outward flows of Italians (and the diasporas they created) were equally as constitutive of Italy as the process of political unification. At the same time, Italians also moved towards the colonies in the horn of Africa, as soldiers, bureaucrats, or citizens, co-opting into projects of demographic colonization. Indeed, officials like Prime Minister Francesco Crispi believed that colonialism would stem transatlantic emigration.6 In 1890 the Italian government declared Eritrea its firstborn colony (la  colonia primogenita), and over the next fifty years the state mobilized Italians (while immobilizing colonized subjects) to settle the territories of Eritrea, Tianjin (China), Somalia, Libya, Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands, Ethiopia, and Albania and, as such, to make Italy abroad.7 In the context of these emigrant and colonial mobilities this chapter attends to the ways in which Italians – as tourists in their own country – reified and reconfigured destination Italy through domestic touring practices in the early-twentieth century. Whereas the tourist system was once the exclusive purview of Thomas Cook, two organizations adapted that infrastructure to order Italian domestic tourism: the aforementioned Touring Club Italiano, and the Fascist regime, especially with its mass leisure organization, the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND, or National Afterwork Organization). While Cook sympathized with the cause of Unification and hoped that his efforts would catalyse the sentiments of Italian national belonging, the TCI and the Fascist regime staked the political nation state as the objective of domestic tourism. Both launched campaigns to help Italians “far conoscere l’Italia” (to know Italy) through tourism. The TCI advanced the Risorgimento as the apogee of Italian nationalism and created tours that honoured it, including visits to battlefields and regional capitals as well as a trip that duplicated Garibaldi’s 1860 Expedition of the Thousand. Tourism under Fascism – which included summer holidays, after-work activities, treni popolari (“popular trains,” or short-term excursions), and theatre and sport productions – created what Victoria De Grazia has called a culture of consent through which the regime manipulated Italians to perpetuate Fascistic ideals through touristic praxis.8

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For both the TCI and the Fascist regime the modern Italian state was, in fact, the destination of Italy. But then again the state was also something of a postmodern construct that metaphorically owed its existence to its inability to exist; l’Italia fatta (Italy made) was precisely l’Italia non fatta (Italy not made). In this particular historical moment the linked mobilities of emigration and colonialism both made and unmade Italy by shoring up and expanding the borders of the nation state (colonialism), while, paradoxically, the mass exodus of Italian citizens (emigration) undermined the political and territorial validity of such borders. The Italian state was therefore unsettled even more – its form expanding with the colonies, and its content further displaced by emigration. To implicitly counter this instability the TCI and the Fascist regime made the political state the goal of tourism, and indeed their campaigns to far conoscere l’Italia intended just that. Thus, the rise of the Italian domestic tourism industry in the early-twentieth century can be understood in part as a reaction to the parallel mobilities of Italian emigration and colonialism. By formalizing tourism as a national project, the domestic tourism sector engaged destination Italy as a means to justify colonial expansion and as a countermeasure against the perceptions of an Italian state weakened by emigration.9 Far conoscere l’Italia: The Touring Club Italiano The Touring Club Italiano was founded in Milan on 8 November 1894 by a group of fifty-seven cycling enthusiasts who decided to create an excursionist club.10 These men preferred bicycles to the more popular modes of transportation at the fin de siècle (for example, railways, steamships, carriages). In such a way they symbolically resisted the technologies of modernity that were rapidly saturating everyday life. The club’s founders were convinced of the urgent need for an organization that would “difendesse e promovesse gli interessi dei ciclisti viaggiatori e del turismo” (defend and promote the interests of cyclist travellers and tourism).11 Within a month the group had adopted the name Touring Club Ciclistico Italiano (TCCI, or Italian Bicycle Touring Club), created a general assembly of more than 150 members, rented an office in Milan, and held elections for an administrative council. Within six months the TCCI had established a monthly magazine and, most important, organized its first group cycling excursion from Milan to Rome. In May 1895 Bertarelli and newly elected club president Federico Johnson led

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4.1  Touring Club Italiano’s inaugural Milan–Rome cycling excursion, 1895. The founder, Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, second from left in white hat, entered Rome with other participants. Photo reproduced by permission from the Touring Club Italiano Archive, Milan.

approximately seventy members on the 750-kilometre journey. Johnson’s group completed the trip in four days, while Bertarelli took charge of the slower-paced riders, who arrived in Rome after seven days. Romans greeted the cyclists with amazement and cheers. Historian and one-time TCI director general Giuseppe Vota wrote of the reception: “le due categorie [di Johnson e di Bertarelli] si riunirono per fare in massa l’ingresso nella Capitale, ove le accoglienze delle Società ciclistiche, del personale consolare del TCCI, dei lombardi di Roma furono entusiastiche, indescrivibili” (The two groups [of Johnson and Bertarelli] came together to make the entrance into the capital en masse, where the reception of the Cycling Club, the consular staff of the TCCI, [and] the Lombards of Rome was enthusiastic beyond description).12 Even Queen Margherita arrived to congratulate the group as they rode along the Via Flaminia.

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Together the queen, the cyclists, and an Italian military regiment travelled as one caravan to the city centre, where their journey ended in a giant celebration at Piazza del Popolo (figure 4.1). Thus, for the first time since Unification, Italians travelled en masse as tourists in their own country, and fellow Italians welcomed them as such. This inaugural tour was quickly followed by other tours. Some trips went north to the Alps, while several others went south. Between 1896 and 1898 Bertarelli and Johnson led excursions to Naples, Benevento, Calabria, Basilicata, and Sicily. These southern tours held symbolic importance for they reinforced the club’s aims to become national in scope by including all regions in its activities, and conversely they also revealed the southern question as underpinning some of the more contentious debates taking place about the club’s organizational structure. According to Daniele Bardelli, serious disagreements erupted between the TCCI’s general administration and local sections over organizational autonomy.13 There were concerns, mostly from sections based in the north, about dealing with the refrattarietà (refractoriness) and l’indolenza fenomenale (phenomenal indolence) of southern cities like Naples, Bari, Caserta, and Salerno. Bardelli notes that these concerns paralleled the suspicious attitude of Milanese public opinion towards the meridionalizzazione (southernization) of the political sphere after Unification.14 Much to their credit, Bertarelli and Johnson confronted this discrimination against the south with their actions and words. First, they led successful cycling excursions to those regions. Second, they championed the necessity of making the touring club a truly national organization that expressed “i bisogni della massa degli individui turisti” (the needs of the mass of individual tourists) and not just the specialized (and prejudiced) interests of local sections.15 In other words, Bertarelli and Johnson believed in the democratizing potentials of tourism and succeeded in installing “uguaglianza assoluta ed effettiva” (absolute and effective equality) within the statutes and practices of the Touring Club Italiano.16 In such ways they not only allayed the prejudices linked to the southern question but also insured the club’s democraticità (democratization) and its accessibility to members of all social classes. Membership grew accordingly in those early decades. The club’s numbers quickly surpassed those of other European cycling clubs. By 1900 it boasted twenty thousand members. In that year, too, the club simplified its name to the Touring Club Italiano in an effort to be more inclusive of all forms of tourism, not just cycling. Five years later, in 1905, membership reached almost fifty thousand, and by 1914, just

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twenty years after the club’s creation, it had close to one hundred and thirty thousand members.17 This growth continued steadily until the late 1920s and 1930s, when it plateaued at an average of four hundred thousand members, mostly likely because of the competing tourism and leisure programs like the OND organized by the Fascist regime. Yet the Touring Club Italiano’s democratizing impulse was also a nationalistic one. Its overarching mission was to “far conoscere l’Italia agli Italiani” (to make Italy known to Italians), which it realized through textual production (such as guidebooks and maps) and touristic practices (such as organized tours and hotel construction). Bertarelli proved the visionary figure who led these efforts, labouring tirelessly not only as an excursion leader but also as the pioneer of the club’s publishing division. For example, he founded and edited the club’s monthly magazine, Rivista mensile del Touring; planned a series of guidebooks to Italy; took leadership of the club’s cartographic section; and compiled a hugely successful road atlas. By the time Bertarelli died in 1926, his publication record was unparalleled with more than 335 articles and thousands of notes and communiqués. Many more were published posthumously. All told, the TCI’s early textual production expressed Bertarelli’s vision of Italy as the consummate symbiosis between destination Italy and the modern political state. An Italian Baedeker The Touring Club Italiano published its first guide, Guida-itinerario dell’Italia e di alcune strade delle regioni limitrofe (Guide-itinerary to Italy and the roads of neighbouring regions), one year after its inception, in 1895. While this was not a guidebook in the style of Murray or Baedeker, the 390-page text included a collection of cycling itineraries with detailed information on road quality, signage, distances, elevation gain, population statistics, public services, and bike repair services as well as accommodation. Giuseppe Vota notes that this first publication both ensured the future publishing successes of the TCI and became critical to the “formazione di una coscienza turistica” (formation of a touristic consciousness) among Italians.18 More important than the publication of the guide were the actual means of its proliferation: the club decided to distribute the Guidaitinerario free to all its members. This singular decision put the TCI’s first textual instantiation of Italy as destination – condensed and flattened into statistics, graphs, and measurements in an operation consistent

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with Barthesian reduction – into the hands of thousands of potential Italian tourists. The ideological stakes of such a distribution strategy were clear: the free dispensation of such a publication rapidly made Italy known to Italians through text and, in doing so, advanced the TCI’s greater patriotic mission. In the early decades of the twentieth century the Touring Club Italiano also intensified this strategy of free distribution by sending out increasing numbers of guidebooks, maps, and atlases to all its members. If the development of print capitalism generated national consciousness as Benedict Anderson has argued, then touristic texts like those of the Touring Club Italiano cultivated a consciousness that focused around destination rather than nation. Anderson argued that the exchange of printed books and newspapers written in codified vernaculars allowed “for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways.”19 By reading and referencing the same texts, people imagined themselves as part of a greater community, an imagined community that extended far beyond the physical boundaries of one’s own home. Anderson qualified: “[The] convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. The potential stretch of these communities was inherently limited, and, at the same time, bore none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries.”20 While he rightly identified the centrality of print as commodity in the creation of modern political states, touristic texts again complicate the process. In the case of Italy the matter became particularly complicated given the paradox of the Italian state. On the one hand, the TCI’s itineraries, maps, and especially guidebooks were written with the intention of supporting (and thus validating) the state. Their free distribution, too, could be seen to deepen national consciousness at an accelerated pace and an unprecedented scope for never before had such patriotic materials been regularly distributed on so vast a scale.21 On the other hand, these texts were written for Italians as tourists, and the Italy figured within them referred to Italy as destination. The Touring Club Italiano also emphasized its political neutrality, or  apoliticità, in both its policies and publications.22 To insure the ­organization’s impartiality, Bertarelli refused many offers to run for political office. While the texts appeared to support an Italian state, produced outside of politics, in an apolitical space, they instead inculcated

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destination Italy within an Italian national consciousness. In other words, the textual production of the TCI generated and sustained the articulation between destination Italy and the modern Italian state. This production was so successful that by the time the club had published its first guidebook in 1914 (distributed gratis to one hundred and thirty thousand members), the text’s impact was felt immediately. The guidebook, Guida d’Italia: Piemonte, Lombardia, Canton Ticino (Guide to Italy: Piedmont, Lombardy, Canton Ticino), was the first of an extensive guidebook series that consisted of sixteen three-hundred-page volumes, complete with topographic maps, city plans, and detailed historical descriptions.23 The volumes covered all the major regions of Italy, including Sicily and Sardinia as well as the colonies.24 The first volume of the Guida d’Italia series had a print run of a hundred and fifty thousand copies, with fifty thousand more printed just two years later. Subsequent volumes such as Liguria, Toscana Settentrionale, Emilia, and Sardegna began with print runs of two hundred thousand. TCI guidebooks were bound in red fabric and measured about the same as a Baedeker. At first glance it was difficult to tell them apart. Yet the series was conceived in part to liberate Italians from Baedeker’s monopoly on the guidebook market. According to Vota, “Gli italiani per conoscere la propria patria erano obbligati a ricorrere a guide straniere e segnatamente alle Guide Baedeker” (To know their own country, Italians were obliged to turn to foreign guidebooks and notably to Baedeker guides), which, he added, were completely inadequate for Italian tourists.25 Bertarelli intended for the Guida d’Italia series to discourage the use of foreign guidebooks and to shape domestic touristic practices.26 Patriotic intent was clear from conception, or, as Bertarelli wrote, “Ogni forma di attività nazionale, individuale e collettiva, sentirà che il quadro della vita italiana, che ci accingiamo a tracciare per tutti i turisti italiani, sarà un mosaico per il quale ciascuno può – anzi deve – dare il proprio sassolino” (Each form of national activity, individual and collective, will feel like a picture of Italian life that we are about to draw for all Italian tourists; it will be a mosaic in which each person can – indeed must – contribute one’s own pebble).27 Here, destination Italy was conceived of as a touristic composition; it was a metaphorical mosaic made by Italians as tourists, who were to contribute “their own pebble” to its creation. A pink flyer included with the first edition celebrated the guidebook’s Italianness as well as its utility: “Consocio! Eccoti il I [primo] Volume della Guida d’Italia … I primi Soci che l’hanno avuto ci hanno tutti

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spontaneamente testimoniato soddisfazione ed orgoglio per l’italianità e l’utilità grande dell’opera” (Fellow member! Here is the first volume of the Guida d’Italia for you … The first members who have had it have all spontaneously told us of their satisfaction and pride in the italianità and great usefulness of the work).28 Addressing its readers with the familiar tu form, the flyer enthusiastically recounted the satisfaction and pride felt by its first readers, who confirmed the work a success, not just as a practical guidebook but also as a material instantiation of italianità (Italianness). Next, the text didactically instructed its readers: “Ora tocca a te. Guarda il volume: esamina il contenuto, scorrilo nelle sue parti. Se da questo esame tu pure trarrai motivo di soddisfazione, rammenta che la forma migliore è più gradita di esprimerla, è quella di inviare subito l’adesione di un socio nuovo” (Now it is your turn. Look at the volume: examine the content, scroll through its parts. If you, too, gain satisfaction from this examination, remember that the best and most welcome form to convey that is to immediately send in the new member registration). Just as this flyer instructed its readers, so the guidebooks directed the behaviour of Italian tourists. The flyer urged the guidebook’s propagation (“inviare subito l’adesione di un socio nuovo”) and explicitly reinforced its textual authority. Tellingly, the guidebooks’ Italianized forms of touristic representation and praxis – and the touristically mediated italianità that resulted – were informed by the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unification. On the Anniversary of the Risorgimento In his description of the rise and fall of the modern Italian nation state Emilio Gentile argued that the spring of 1911 – the fiftieth anniversary of the Risorgimento – was a singular moment in Italian history.29 It constituted an apex of patriotic sentiment in Italy and the crystallization of national unity unseen since the Risorgimento. Gentile explained that “Il ‘giubileo della patria’ conferiva un crisma ufficiale all’immagine dello Stato nazionale che aveva la sua legittimazione nella sintesi ideale fra la democrazia e la monarchia, fra patria e libertà, fra nazione e umanità, fra aspirazione alla grandezza e volontà di pace e di progresso” (The “Jubilee of the Patria” conferred an official validation on the image of the nation state that had its legitimation in the ideal synthesis between democracy and monarchy, between patria and freedom, between nation and humanity, between the desire for greatness and the desire for peace and progress).30 In short, the anniversary celebrations officially

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validated the Italian political state as the symbolic consummation of the Risorgimento national project. The Touring Club Italiano participated exuberantly in the anniversary festivities, staging its first event in May 1910, which was a commemorative excursion that retraced Garibaldi’s famous Spedizione dei Mille from Piedmont through Sicily and Calabria. More than six hundred and fifty members made the journey by bicycle, car, and train, ­including some one hundred of Garibaldi’s original redshirt soldiers. Veterans were accorded places of honour in the caravan and given opportunities to make speeches at the most famous battlefields. For Bertarelli the journey was nothing less than a pilgrimage – a culmination of patriotic sentiment and national unification. He wrote that the excursion was a “trionfo della fratellanza fra lontane regioni d’Italia, apoteosi del sentimento patriottico, contributo al carattere e all’educazione” (triumph of brotherhood between the distant regions of Italy, [an] apotheosis of patriotic sentiment, [and a] contribution to character and education).31 Of course, the carattere (character) that Bertarelli referenced here was that of Italian national character, and accordingly the excursion’s capacity to positively influence this carattere demonstrated the power of touristic praxis to embody and enact italianità. These were expressions of Italian identity predicated on the articulation of destination Italy and the modern political state, which in this case was organized around a single event, the commemorative excursion of Garibaldi’s military campaign. In 1911 the TCI played a central role in organizing and promoting the quinquagenary jubilee festivities, most notably in Rome and Turin. It sponsored a yachting cruise that circumnavigated the peninsula, beginning near Venice and ending in Rome. According to Vota, the yacht’s arrival in Rome was a moment of national pride as the sailing event was purported to be one of the greatest ever completed.32 Also, the world fair that year had been staged in Turin to coincide with the anniversary, and the TCI was commissioned to publish the fair’s illustrated guide.33 The club also constructed a model alpine hotel on the fairgrounds that attracted thousands of visitors. Vota wrote that the hotel was an innovative and effective form of touristic propaganda for the TCI.34 For all of its pomp and circumstance, however, the historical moment of the fiftieth jubilee was extremely fragile. The proclamations of national pride and the success of la grande Italia quickly evaporated after Italy entered into war against Turkey in October 1911. From there the Italian state spun into a crisis that would be exacerbated by the start

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of the First World War in 1914. Within the span of several years Italians experienced a dramatic swing from the celebration of their nation state and its successes to profound anxiety about its very future. As a result the Touring Club Italiano implemented new touring practices to shore up these unstable limits of the political state, particularly at their most extreme margins – the colonies and the so-called terre irredenti (unredeemed lands), these latter being the territories inhabited by Italian-speaking peoples that remained in control of nonItalian governments. In Libya, for example, just two months after the Italian invasion of Tripoli in October 1911, the TCI published a free map of Tripolitania that was meant for use by tourists and soldiers alike. Bertarelli actually proposed tourism as a prime strategy through which to colonize Libya and thus restore Italy to its rightful imperialist dominion marked by the boundaries of ancient Rome.35 Putting rhetoric into practice, he and TCI leaders organized a 430-person excursion to Tripolitania in 1914 and another to Cyrenaica in April 1920. These tours simultaneously extolled Italy’s colonial project and showcased tourism’s power to civilize.36 Similarly, the aftermath of the First World War provoked intense border disputes within irredentist lands, especially along the confines of what is today Austria, Slovenia, and Croatia.37 Just as it had laid claim to Libya as part of the Italian state, the TCI also represented these contested regions as part of a unified Italy in its maps and guidebooks. As Vota notes, “Fra i primi compiti che il Touring affrontò nel dopoguerra fu la diffusione della conoscenza delle terre da poco ricongiunte alla madrepatria e la loro valorizzazione turistica” (Among the first tasks that the TCI faced in the post-war period was the diffusion of consciousness about the lands [that had been] recently re-united with the motherland, and their touristic valorization).38 As the Italian state struggled to stabilize political confines and territorial place names, Bertarelli made the executive decision to privilege the Italian nomenclature of all irredentist lands. For example, formerly Austrian towns like Bozen, Brixen, and Toblach became Bolzano, Bressanone, and Dobbiaco, respectively. Further east, Slavic place names such as Koper, Poreč, and Portorož transformed into Capodistria, Parenzo, and Portorosso. Thus, the use of Italian place names in TCI guidebooks stemmed from Bertarelli’s desire not only to affirm and exalt the Italianness of these new territories but also to incorporate those irredentist lands into both nation and destination.39

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In the decade after the fiftieth anniversary of Unification, then, the TCI emphatically Italianized touristic texts and practices to shore up the Italian state, which had been politically and economically unsteadied by both the Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) and the First World War (1914–18). The club expanded its successful campaign to far conoscere l’Italia beyond the territorial boundaries of the state, and focused particular attention on the Italian colonies. Indeed, the mandate evolved into a campaign to far conoscere le colonie (to know the colonies) in the 1920s and 1930s.40 In these decades, too, the domestic tourism industry would not just Italianize but also fascistize destination Italy, for, beginning in 1922, tourism and politics were entirely recalibrated at the moment that Mussolini rose to power. Tourism under Fascism Italian domestic tourism under the Fascist regime (1922–43) called attention to the many ways that touristic representations and practices were put in service to Fascist politics. The regime exercised utmost control over touring itineraries and tourist crowds, while it cleansed the built environment of any material considered incongruent with Fascism. This process of ripristino (restoration), and its often contentious politics, was bound up with the development of domestic tourism. According to D. Medina Lasanky, the process was one of aesthetic purification that supported ideas of Italian cultural superiority, ideas that would be actualized in touristic practice.41 She writes, “During the Fascist period the city served as a text whose urban space and monuments were carefully edited for public consumption … urban space [became] a stage for defining and developing identity politics … [and] the public actively and unquestioningly participated in historical tourism as part of a newly defined patriotic self-consciousness.”42 In such ways the Fascist regime both institutionalized a national tourist gaze and, at the same time, manipulated and re-contoured the physical spaces of destination Italy. Such manipulation of the built environment also prompted a shift in modes of sightseeing, that is, the visual rhetoric of tourism under Fascism. Against the backdrop of these built forms – and the cultural events staged within them – particular histories could be staged and co-opted in support of the regime. For instance, Lasansky shows that festivals, like the Calcio Storico (Historic Soccer) in Florence or Giostra del Saraceno (Joust of the Saracen) in Arezzo conflated the medieval with the Renaissance to

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form a selective (and Fascist) rewriting of history.43 Specifically, the processions and participants formed tableaux vivants against urban spaces that had been edited and “medievalized” by the regime. To the eyes of the present-day tourist these edited spaces have become so naturalized that they are simply manifestations of an authentic, medieval past. However, they are really “neomedieval/Renaissance theme-park environments” built during Fascism to engage the regime’s culture of spectacle. They not only materialized Fascist interpretations of history but also allayed architecture into the service of tourism.44 To render the tourist system Fascist, the regime developed a complex bureaucratic apparatus that performed two interrelated functions: (1) to organize, promote, and fascistize the domestic tourism sector, and (2) to control existing tourism organizations like the Touring Club Italiano. The most prominent and well-studied expression of domestic tourism organization under Fascism was the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro.45 This program, which had enrolled 3.8 million Italians by 1939, was charged with providing mass leisure opportunities to Fascist subjects. Tourism comprised a large segment of its sponsored activities, most notably with summer holidays and organized excursions. As such, the practices of mass tourism linked to the formation and management of masses under the Fascist regime. If, as Walter Benjamin noted, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead the chance to express themselves,” then tourism became a prime means for that expression.46 What follows, he wrote, was the introduction of aesthetics into political life. Thus, the bureaucracy that arose around the Italian domestic tourism sector was an apparatus pressed into the production of Fascist values, and in this way it transformed destination Italy into an aesthetic space tempered by Fascism – a fascistized bel paese. States of Bureaucratization One of the first and most prominent organizations of the bureaucratic apparatus was the Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche (ENIT, or National Association of Tourist Industries). Founded in 1919, this public-private partnership had two definitive purposes: to rebuild Italy’s badly damaged hotel network after the First World War and to facilitate long-range tourism planning and propaganda. After Mussolini assumed power in 1922, government officials increased their presence on ENIT’s administrative council. There were now representatives from Parliament, ministries, and railways all jockeying for control of

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this organization. The power struggles within ENIT bespoke the regime’s accelerated expropriation of the entire Italian tourism industry via extensive bureaucratization in order to place it in the service of the Fascist state. ENIT represented the start of this massive operation. Under the regime more than half a dozen tourism organizations were formed, often with overlapping functions and no clear jurisdiction. What was clear, however, was the critical purchase that tourism held in the political sphere. R.J.B. Bosworth notes, “Mussolini and [the Fascist newspaper] Popolo d’Italia both regularly underlined the economic importance of tourist promotion, even if they could not help boasting that Italy had a natural ‘tourist primacy in the world.’”47 Nonetheless, the industry was poorly defined, and bureaucrats were unsure of exact tourist demographics. For example, foreign travellers were a significant market segment, but so too were Italians travelling in their own country. The regime also classified Italians who had emigrated to the Americas or Australia as yet another category of tourist.48 Colonial tourists grew exponentially during this time, forcing the government to deal with policies of colonialism and tourism simultaneously. In response to these different subjects of Italian tourism the Fascist regime created a number of competing organizations to manage the different demographics. In addition to the autonomous Touring Club Italiano and the semi-public ENIT, it formed and funded the following nationwide organizations during its years in power: the Compagnia Italiana per il Turismo (CIT, or Italian Tourism Company) in 1927; Commissariato per il Turismo (Commissioner for Tourism) in 1931; Direzione Generale del Turismo (DG, or General Directorate of Tourism) in 1934; and Ente Nazionale Industrie Turistiche ed Alberghiere (ENITEA, or National Association of Tourism and Hotel Industries) in 1939.49 The regime also opened tourism propaganda offices abroad in London, Paris, New York, and Buenos Aires. Likewise, tourism sectors within the Italian colonies were increasingly micro-managed by site-specific institutions like Ente Turistico ed Alberghiero della Libia (ETAL, or Libyan Hotel and Tourism Association) and Ente Turistico Albanese (ETA, or Albanian Tourism Association). While bureaucratization occurred across all aspects of the Fascist regime, organizations like ETAL and ETA amplified the stratifications inherent in colonial policy by intertwining them with touristic praxis. The mastery of tourist over destination thus mirrored the mastery of colonizer over colony – and vice versa – and, as such, enhanced the asymmetries of power and the hierarchized

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social relations that underpinned the Italian colonial enterprise, especially among its Mediterranean colonies, Libya and Rhodes.50 Yet these asymmetries and hierarchies were not limited to the colonies; the ordinary violence resulting from such bureaucratic structures was equally felt in the metropole.51 In the domestic tourism sector, five major national tourism organizations existed by the late 1930s, often working at odds with one another. Each province boasted a tourist office, or Ente Provinciale del Turismo (Provincial Tourism Association), that created regional tourism policy.52 Each city and village had a local tourist office, too, commonly known as the Pro Loco. Government-run hospitality schools for future tour operators, hotel managers, and tourism administrators opened around the country beginning in 1928.53 And all of these efforts developed alongside the most significant and arguably most Fascist domestic tourism organization of all: the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro. Prior to the OND the Touring Club Italiano was the pre-eminent domestic tourism organization in Italy, and accordingly the regime attempted to limit its autonomy by the parallel means of bureaucratization and fascistization. As the TCI prided itself on political neutrality, it became a particularly symbolic target for the regime. In 1926, for example, Fascist administrators pressured TCI officials to move their headquarters from Milan to Rome, which the officials resisted only by calling in favours with sympathetic politicians. In 1934 those same club officials were required to register in the Associazione del Pubblico Impiego (Association of Public Employment). According to Vota, enrolment in this association had less to do with personnel and more to do with insuring that the TCI be held accountable to the Fascist party: “Si trattava evidentemente non tanto di provvedere alla tutela degli interessi del personale, già garantita dal contratto di lavoro, quanto un tentativo di irreggimentare il Sodalizio sotto l’autorità politica del partito” (It was evidently not so much to ensure the protection of staff interests, already guaranteed by employment contract[s], as an attempt to regiment the association under the political authority of the [Fascist] party).54 The pressure on the TCI to become a Fascist institution was constant. Club officials managed to remain neutral until the mid-1930s when the newly formed Direzione Generale del Turismo (General Directorate of Tourism) manoeuvred for control of all TCI publications, including the popular magazine Le Vie d’Italia. Only by the personal intervention of the then TCI president, Carlo Bonardi, at the DG office did the Touring Club retain control of its publications. However, this was not without consequences.

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By 1937, resistance proved all but impossible. That year, Bonardi received a censorship order from the Ministry of Press and Propaganda and again went to the highest levels of government to argue against it, eventually winning a brief reprieve from Mussolini himself.55 This setback prompted ministry bureaucrats to focus on an issue that could not be resolved through political contacts: the name of the Touring Club Italiano itself. Given Mussolini’s well-documented language politics (such as the suppression of non-Italian vocabulary, and the ban on the pronoun Lei), the English name “Touring Club” was an easy target for censors. On 4 July 1937 the club received mandatory notice to change its name to Unione Turistica Italiana (Italian Touristic Union) in order to comply with the government’s push to eradicate all foreign words from the Italian language. It was a linguistic campaign that tied into the regime’s broader program of autarky, which paired economic isolationism with national self-sufficiency.56 In agriculture as in technology, Fascist Italy would also become self-sufficient in language. Instead, the TCI’s board of advisers adopted the name Consociazione Turistica Italiana (CTI, or Italian Touristic Consociation).57 While consociation was a rare term (related almost exclusively to botany), Bonardi argued that it maintained the spirit of union while allowing the organization to retain its initials and logo. Fascist bureaucrats approved and implemented this name change, but in day-to-day operations Bonardi defiantly called the organization by its anglicized name, il Touring. As the case of the Touring Club Italiano shows, the domestic tourism industry grew increasingly bureaucratized under the Fascist regime while state tourism policymaking grew increasingly centralized.58 The overlapping and often redundant bureaucratic entities – ENIT, CIT, Commissariato, DG, and ENITEA, as well as regional and municipal tourism offices – worked disjointedly to promote destination Italy on behalf, and as part of, the Fascist state. Yet it was through the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro that the regime used mass tourism to exercise the greatest control over its subjects and to consequently subjugate them to the state. A Nation, Afterwork Founded in 1925, the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro promoted all aspects of the Fascist regime through leisure activities. Domestic tourism was a large part of the operation, and the OND helped Italians to know their country through a fascistized destination Italy. Its self-declared

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mission was to “promote social education and civil progress” in order to discipline and prepare individual Italians both morally and physically “for the advantage of national society.”59 According to Victoria De Grazia, these activities, as well as the OND as an institution, represented a “sustained effort by the fascist regime to make the working population as a whole respond to and endure the terrible and contradictory pressures of a distorted economic growth taking place in a country in which the distance between government and governed was vast, regional differences sharp, and class and political divisions especially bitter.”60 Good workers made good Fascist citizens, yes, but tourism and leisure interpellated subjects who also willingly acquiesced to Fascist control. Thus, the OND managed to cultivate, in the words of De Grazia, “the formation of a seemingly egalitarian though definitively ‘low-brow’ national cultural identity” to create a popularized culture of consent.61 In organization the OND was divided into three branches: cultural instruction, social welfare, and physical training.62 The first branch (cultural instruction) mixed the pursuit of “high” and “low” arts and traditions by sponsoring activities from opera performances and folk dancing to libraries and short-story competitions. Recreation in the name of culture underscored a Fascist national identity. The second branch (social welfare) supported various forms of community outreach. For instance, this section sponsored a series of public health-related initiatives, which included everything from first-aid training to sports medicine clinics. The third and most popular division (physical training) aimed at creating a generation of Italians fit for work and, if need be, war. In this ­respect the OND ran physical education institutions for men (and occasionally women), organized sporting contests, and, most important, arranged for touristic excursions to all parts of the country. In practice, OND excursions usually took place over a weekend and often involved an overnight trip to the countryside, a nearby city or artistic centre, or other places of interest. The organization also built summer camps (colonie estive) for children, usually near the sea, such as the famed Colonia Novarese near Rimini on the Adriatic coast (figure 4.2).63 Its program of popular trains (treni popolari) offered cheap day fares to the countryside for salaried workers. According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, by 1933 “millions of men and women were participating in these outings, which aimed to nationalize Italians by exposing them to their ‘collective’ cultural and historic patrimony.”64 The OND also organized various cruises, like those on the famous ocean liner Rex, which it paired with excursions of organizations, like the Fascist youth

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4.2  The Colonia Novarese in Rimini, 1934, a beach-front summer camp built and managed by the Fascist mass leisure organization, Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro. Photo reproduced by permission from the Archive of the Banca Popolare di Novara, Italy.

groups of the Balilla and Avanguardisti.65 As OND propaganda put it, “excursions comprise the movement of the masses by all means of locomotion, from train to steamer, from motor vehicles to aeroplanes. Excursions in Italy are very efficiently arranged; members of the Dopolavoro enjoy and appreciate this form of recreation and are attracted by its numberless possibilities.”66 To facilitate excursions, the OND, like Thomas Cook, arranged special discounts on railways, hotels, and restaurants, secured free admission to state-run galleries and museums, provided travel insurance, and offered reductions on sports clothes and equipment. As a result, Italians signed up for OND membership in droves (figure 4.3). In 1937, for example, approximately 2.6 million Italians took part in OND excursions, which was far more than the roughly 470,000 members belonging to the Touring Club Italiano in that same year.67

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4.3  Membership card for the Opera Nazionale Dopo­ lavoro, 1938. According to the quote from Mussolini on its cover, the OND is “a work of peace that pursues a sublime mission of brotherhood, love, and civilization.” Author’s private collection.

With these excursions, tourism became synonymous with the OND for many Italians during Fascism. The OND dictated how to travel (in masses via pre-arranged forms of transportation, room, and board), what to see (for example, the countryside and historical and/or artistic centres), and for how much (for example, discounted hotels and tickets). Again, the reach of the OND was extensive: in 1929, just four years

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after its inception, it had some 1.4 million members, and in 1939, on the eve of war, that figure had increased to more than 3.8 million.68 As De Grazia notes, “The social and political importance of an organization the size of the OND cannot, however, be measured totally in terms of the membership … With its full-time salaried staff of 700 and over 100,000 volunteers at the provincial and local levels, the OND exercised a critical social function, offering upward mobility and status to its petty bourgeois functionaries, and an equally important political role by satisfying national service harbored by ‘fascists of the first hour.’”69 With so many members, the OND conditioned a wide-reaching Italian tourist gaze, which privileged the monuments and the festivals that best expressed Fascist ideals (that is, virility, spectacle, and conformity) and turned a blind eye to the cities and landscapes that were not attuned to the regime’s ideological agenda.70 In such ways the OND participated in or, better yet, it catalysed a Barthesian reduction of the grandest sort – a destination Italy reduced to its Fascist superficies. The OND co-opted tourism and leisure in the name of the Fascist state; specifically, the state used the OND to harness tourism and leisure in order to put its stamp on Italian citizens. Thus, Fascism not only introduced aesthetics into politics, as Benjamin described, but also invested them with leisure. Italy as destination became not just an aesthetic space, a fascistized bel paese, but also a space of leisure such as that imagined by the guidebook tropes of il dolce far niente (the sweet art of idleness) and la dolce vita (the sweet life). And this collective, domestic space of leisure was delineated, and also domesticated, by the selfpolicing actions of the touristic praxis that was formed by and within a pervasive culture of consent. With the advent of the Second World War, however, the Fascist regime, the OND, and its greater tourism bureaucracy reached a strange and protracted end. Mussolini was deposed in 1943 but ineffectively governed from the puppet Republic of Salò until 1945, when he was killed by partisans near the Swiss border (and his body was then strung up in Milan’s Piazzale Loreto on public display).71 The end of the Second World War sent Italy into profound political and economic crisis. After twenty years of Fascist rule and a definitive war-time defeat, the Italian state lost all of its colonies and a large part of its territory (Istria) and was virtually bankrupt. The years shortly after the war were marked by poverty, sickness, and desperation. In the political realm, Christian Democrats, socialists, and communists fought for control of the national government, while the cold war began to take shape

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on the global stage. Economically, believers in the free market (as opposed to socialist or communist systems) gained control of the Italian treasury and the Banca d’Italia. While this dealt a blow to the burgeoning workers’ movement, it set the stage for a plethora of self-financed business investments, rapid economic growth, and the ideological ascendancy of neoliberalism. In the 1950s and the 1960s, prosperity would come in the form of the so-called boom economico (economic miracle). New systems of production, export markets, American influences, and cheap labour all contributed to this period of unprecedented economic growth. In addition, there was a corresponding boom in mass tourism that stemmed from advances in transportation technology as well as the creation and widespread commodification of the all-inclusive package tour. By the late 1960s destination Italy was a far cry from the defeated, backward, and poverty-stricken Italietta (little Italy) of the immediate post-war. From that point on, any city, region, or province was seen as a potential tourist attraction, and Italy itself emerged as an always already holiday space.

5 Masses in Transit: The New Economy of Tourism in the Twentieth Century

In the March 1960 issue of Le Vie d’Italia (The ways of Italy), the monthly magazine of the Touring Club Italiano, Aldo Saponaro noted a strange new phenomenon that had appeared in Milan: smog. His article was rather alarmist in tone and focused on the emerging health problems and increasing mortality rates related to this new form of atmospheric pollution. It even prescribed the daily use of anti-smog masks to combat what Saponaro declared “l’invisibile nemico dell’uomo moderno” (the invisible enemy of modern man).1 The smog article was one of many concerning Italy’s rapid industrialization after the Second World War that appeared in this TCI series. On the one hand, the magazine often praised technological progress and celebrated the hallmarks of modernization (that is, mopeds, automobiles, television, aeroplanes) as they arrived on the Italian market in massive numbers.2 Yet, on the other hand, it revealed moments of profound ambivalence – sometimes even resistance – to this emergent modernization. Articles such as this bespoke a profound anxiety among many Italians about a future dominated by technology. In this brave new world, speeding cars and aeroplanes were suspected of causing irreparable physiological and psychic damage. Televisions and remote controls would lead to social isolation and epistemological ennui. Medical doctor Alberto Brambilla even theorized a pathology of motorization: “Penso che in un futuro trattato di patologia della motorizzazione si dovranno distinguere danni di ordine psichico e danni di ordine fisico … non si debbano trascurare quelle alterazioni della psiche e del sistema nervoso in senso lato, che colpiscono prevalentemente i guidatori” (I think that a future treatise on the pathology of motorization will have to distinguish between damages of psychic order and damages

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of physical order … it should not neglect those alterations of the psyche and the nervous system at large, which prevalently have an impact on drivers).3 Brambilla argued that life “on the move” (la vita a bordo) profoundly changed the body’s physiology, and warned that motorized vehicles would cause an epidemic of physical and psychic atrophy by exacerbating the anxieties aligned with a new, sedentary, and exceedingly modern lifestyle.4 In this modern life on the move, tourism assumed an increasingly big role. Across Europe in the 1950s and 1960s new constellations of consumption, mobility, and leisure marked the changed textures of imperialism as they were detaching from (but were still linked to) the decolonization that set into motion the dismantling of European colonial empires.5 Imperium was now an emporium, and an American one at that.6 The rise of consumer society in this historical moment, in both Europe and the United States, led to new forms of touristic praxis conditioned by commodification (for example, all-inclusive package tours), for which were developed new infrastructures of tourism (for example, holiday villages). This chapter sets forth the salient developments in the Italian tourism industry in the decades following the Second World War, among them in general the emergence of leisure as an inalienable right and the advances in transportation, and, specific to destination Italy, the ways in  which holiday resorts and tour operators enmeshed Italians of all classes into a leisurely life on the move. What this enmeshment marked, too, was nothing less than the economic salvation of the Italian state. Tourism symbolized progress, for not only did it exemplify a general triumph of modernization but it also brought countries like Italy and Germany, defeated in the Second World War, back into the fold of the international political economy.7 In this moment of the boom economico (economic miracle) destination Italy became increasingly fixed as an object of tourism. The practices of consumption that determined social relations in this burgeoning era of consumer society commodified Italy as the intangible product of package tours and brought it to life in built form as the holiday village.8 Thus, the formative relationship between Italy as destination and the modern Italian state – once intensely bound together during the Risorgi­ mento – became estranged at this moment as destination assumed and actualized the forces of excess consumption. As a result the articulation between state and destination became ever more unbalanced as did its significations. On the one hand, touristic consumption shored up and strengthened the imaginary of destination Italy. On the other hand, the

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ongoing political disorder following the war – shifting coalitions, frequent restructuring – weakened and fractured the Italian state.9 Put differently, destination Italy was expressed and commodified as a cohesive idealized space of tourism and assumed a position of semiotic dominance in relation to the state. Touristic consumption loosened signifying relations, and destination Italy simultaneously dissociated itself from the state and subordinated the state to a semiotics of tourism. Hence Italy is better known today in the cultural imagination of many by its touristic stereotypes (that is, cuisine, art, soccer, fashion, landscape) than by way of any political figuration. One final consequence of this semiotic slackening was that it allowed destination Italy to go mobile in the age of late capitalism. It became spatialized as a simulacrum, a floating signifier of itself in the de-territorialized geographies of touristic space. Of Working Hours and Grand Hotels The simulacra of destination Italy in the early twenty-first century depend upon the Italian state’s institutionalization of leisure as an inalienable right almost one hundred years prior. Then, Italian working classes – buoyed by the successful protests of labourers in the United Kingdom against long hours and poor factory conditions – lobbied for the separation of work time and leisure time. Their initial demands for an eighthour workday mobilized labour into a collective social force that would gain serious political traction during the late 1960s and early 1970s with the Italian workers’ movement.10 The regulation of leisure time was indeed an important part of these efforts.11 Within Italy both vacation time and work hours became institutionalized between 1919 and 1920, that is, during the so-called biennio rosso (red biennium) when the Socialist Party controlled the government.12 Successful legislation codified work contracts that guaranteed eight-hour workdays and paid vacations (usually ten to twenty days off for clerical workers and six days for manual labourers); by regulating leisure time, these contracts laid the bases for Italian mass tourism in the post-war decades.13 For working- and middle-class Italians the idea of travelling for leisure, or andare in ferie (to go on holiday), fully developed under the Fascist regime (1922–43), and the domestic tourism industry rearranged itself to attract these newly leisure-conscious crowds. Of course, the Fascist regime created an extensive touristic bureaucracy and inaugurated mass leisure programs, like the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro. Yet alongside these government initiatives, there was a marked increase in small- and medium-scale

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lodging directed towards the middle classes during this period. These smaller pensioni (pensions) became affordable alternatives to the opulent grand hotels frequented by wealthy travellers, hotels that had characterized the domestic tourism industry in Italy at the fin de siécle. Prior to its “massification” under the Fascist regime the Italian domestic tourism sector had developed along three particular categories in the late-nineteenth century: spa tourism (turismo termale), seaside tourism (turismo balneare), and mountain or lakeside tourism (turismo montano e lacuale).14 Places like Salsomaggiore (Emilia-Romagna), Montecatini Terme (Tuscany), Viareggio (Tuscany), and the Val d’Aosta (Alps) developed infrastructures to accommodate spa, beach, and alpine tourists, respectively. Typically, a grand hotel anchored these destinations, and it was augmented by other structures dedicated to leisure, like casinos and promenades. Furthermore, these first iterations of destination Italy aimed at Italian tourists were linked to the parallel inventions of a new leisure space, the Riviera, and a new leisure time, summer, in a wider Mediterranean context. In the late 1800s, coastal towns in France and Italy turned into winter playgrounds for European elites looking to escape harsher climates or for those who were seeking a cure for medical conditions. Known as les hivernants (winter tourists), these wealthy travellers arrived in late October and stayed until the following spring. Tourism in this period followed a clear movement from north to south, from industrialized centres to peripheral seaside villages. According to Orvar Löfgren, les hivernants spent most of their time preoccupied with their health or engaged in social activities like strolling, riding in carriages, partying, dancing, and gambling.15 Taking the waters at one of these resorts, along with fresh air and sunshine, was believed to help combat tuberculosis, a common ailment of the era.16 It was also the era of the grand hotel, and these luxury accommodations became the sites of budding society life.17 The hotels, and touristic infrastructure in general, physically transformed the once small coastal towns, like Nice and San Remo. For example, Nice’s Promenade des Anglais (Promenade of the English) was constructed for British tourists who wished to stroll along the seaside, an act tantamount to lunacy in the minds of many locals. This esplanade represented the moment at which the Riviera appeared as a new leisure space, and the city began to re-structure itself, in part, to meet the new demands of tourists as such. As these cities reinvented themselves spatially, a new leisure time – summer – developed simultaneously. In his epic study of the sixteenthcentury Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel described summer as a time

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when cities were abandoned in search of coolness and relief.18 From May to September, people retreated from the heat into shuttered houses or mountain getaways. Summer was understood to be a time of escaping the heat, and the sun was something to be avoided rather than celebrated. In the 1920s, however, these long-held beliefs changed radically. This was the decade in which sunshine became a symbol of health, hope, and freedom.19 Correspondingly, the suntan emerged as a new status symbol of health and wealth, and sunbathing became the favoured mode of acquiring it. Prior to this, suntans were the mark of lower-class workers forced to toil outdoors, while pale skin remained the preferred aesthetic of the upper classes. Yet, from the 1920s onward, tourists increasingly set off in pursuit of the perfect tan, and summer turned into their favourite season. In places such as Nice and San Remo les hivernants of the winter promenade migrated to the summertime beach. The era of the grand hotel was over, and a new summer life on the Riviera had begun. Italy, too, continued to prove popular with visitors. For Italian tourists the town of Rimini on the Adriatic coast emerged as the site of Italian beach culture par excellence (figure 5.1).20 The town developed on an ad hoc basis, and its touristic infrastructure was aimed at middleclass Italians, not the wealthy hivernants from abroad. In the early decades of the twentieth century there were failed attempts to attract international visitors to Rimini; however, these affluent tourists preferred the Lido in Venice or the more established Riviera destinations. But in these failures Rimini laid the roots of its long-term success. In 1906 the municipal government and the local bathing society embarked on a joint venture to construct a 250-room grand hotel. For decades this hotel lost money, yet it continued to be subsidized by public and private monies. Why? According to Patrizia Battilani, the grand hotel proved an ingenious marketing strategy to attract middle-class tourists to Rimini. She writes: “La presenza di tali strutture di lusso garantiva a Rimini un’immagine promozionale in grado di attirare la media e piccola borghesia che d’altra parte non avrebbe mai potuto usufruirne … creavano delle esternalità positive grazie alle quali il turismo del ceto medio fioriva” (The presence of these luxurious facilities guaranteed Rimini a promotional image capable of attracting middleand lower-middle classes that, on the other hand, could never enjoy them … [they] created positive appearances, thanks to which middleclass tourism flourished).21 Again, infrastructure developed extemporaneously to accommodate these tourists mostly in the form of small, family-run pensioni or rooms to let in local houses. Middle-class Italians

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5.1  Rimini beach life circa 1920s. when summer became the dominant tourist season in Europe. Rimini on the Adriatic, seen here in that decade with its grand hotel, emerged as the epicentre of Italian beach culture and middleclass domestic tourism. Photo reproduced by permission from the Biblioteca Gambalunga, Rimini, Italy.

– who dreamed of staying at the grand hotel but settled for more modest accommodations – ensured Rimini’s long-term success. By the 1930s almost 1.6 million Italians visited the beaches of Rimini, and their evergrowing numbers led to a construction boom.22 In the aftermath of the Second World War, tourist numbers to Rimini quickly climbed back to pre-war levels and were also buoyed by the ever-increasing numbers of German visitors, some of them soldiers returning as tourists.23 By 1961 the numbers had quintupled to approximately 5.1 million visits a year. Likewise, hotel construction grew to accommodate these masses; however, the lack of a master plan led to high density and little open space, resulting in a city of pensioni seemingly jumbled atop one another. Compared to other beach destinations, however, vacations to Rimini could also be had on the cheap: a ten-day vacation that included airfare,

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hotel, meals, and beach access ran to about 80,000 lire in 1960.24 Costs could be even lower if one drove a car or took a bus. Even today the Adriatic coastline that stretches beyond Rimini northward towards Cesenatico is a concrete slough of almost identical lowrise apartment buildings constructed for tourism. The smells of new plastic sand pails and suntan oil drift languidly into restaurants and seaside bars. Lounge chairs of every colour lattice the beach like recumbent pieces on a chessboard. Rimini is still one of the most popular destinations for middle-class Italians looking to get a suntan and to experience the Riviera life of summer. And its success in attracting middle-class Italian tourists during the 1950s shifted to attracting middle-class international tourists in later decades as Rimini became a destination that, in part, pioneered the package tour. Travelling Revolutions: Mass Transport and Package Tours The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of the all-inclusive package tour. The forms of organized tourism made popular in the previous decades – such as those organized by Fascist, Catholic, and communist leisure associations – declined in popularity.25 Instead, destinations themselves emerged as protagonists of tourism, increasingly commodified by the rise of consumer society. The experience of these packaged destinations was supremely economical, too, including transportation, accommodation, meals, and often activities on site. Commodification refashioned sites like Rimini into destinations for less affluent Italians and foreigners who had never before had the means to travel. Accord­ ingly, the rise of three specific transport technologies – bus, car, and aeroplane – physically circulated millions of tourists (particularly Italians) throughout these newly commodified spaces of destination Italy. Not only did these tourists bear witness to the country’s rapid modernization, but they also experienced it corporeally along new vectors of mobility (sight sensing) and actualized it through new forms of transport. The Bus Tour The first of the transport technologies was the bus tour. As the economies of northern Europe began to recover after the Second World War, middle- and working-class tourists from the region demanded cheaper travel to the south, namely to Italy. The bus tour fulfilled the need for

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low-cost travel among the working classes who were touring en masse for the first time. By 1951 foreign tourists to Italy numbered 5.4 million, of which 3.1 million arrived by highway, many on buses.26 The early 1950s saw the peak of the bus tour, for in the latter part of the decade and well into the 1960s tourists preferred to travel in their newly acquired automobiles. Yet the bus tour became an institution that greatly influenced many of the ideals and rituals of charter tours. In the 1950s to go on a bus tour was to go on an adventure; it was not considered the disagreeable form of travel that it might be today. Bus travel inaugurated a sense of camaraderie that became attached to the package tour. As tourists travelled from north to south, often from the United Kingdom and Germany to Italy, their buses turned into second homes. The buses acquired a reassuring familiarity and a sense of fictive kinship developed among fellow travellers, which marked a bus micro-culture based on routines, rituals, inside jokes, and other forms of folklore. The bus became “our bus,” and tourists felt a certain possessiveness towards it (that is, “my seat,” “my window”).27 Tourists formed tight-knit, yet short-lived, communities that bonded through the shared experiences of bus travel. It is possible that the sense of camaraderie developed on the bus tour (and later on the package tour) might even represent a brief reprieve from the alienation of modernity. If the tourist proves an apt metaphor for modern man in general, as Dean MacCannell has argued, then the bus tour provided an experience of authenticity related to touristic affinity.28 The bus proved the centre around which tourists developed real social bonds with one another. This bus was “ours” and not that of anyone else. “We” were an exclusive group. Similarly, within the culture of Italian package tours, there is a designated animatore (animator), who is not a tour guide but has the primary role of fostering community among tourists through games and activities as well as maintaining the borders of the group. As such, the package tourist develops an affinity for fellow tourists and finds a sense of belonging and authenticity among them – fleeting experiences of real relationships in the face of modern alienation. The fictive touristic kinship born on the bus tour, however, was not as appealing as was the freedom and independence associated with the automobile. In the late 1950s and early 1960s mass tourism transformed once again as cars became household possessions and tourists quickly abandoned buses in favour of them. The rapid increase in car ownership also corresponded to a rise in new touristic infrastructures like

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interstate highways and motels, which both alleviated the physical demands of car travel and advanced a notion of mass tourism centred on the automobile. Automobiles, Highways, and Motels In Italy, cars were both coveted possessions and integral parts of the country’s economic miracle. Automobiles changed urban panoramas and natural landscapes, transforming centuries-old piazzas into parking lots and scarring mountain passes with asphalt. Social life went mobile, too, as it was amplified by a growing Italian car culture throughout the period. Consequently this car culture spurred developments in touristic infrastructure, like the motel (motor-hotel) and the Autostrada del Sole (Highway of the Sun), allowing for easier access to packaged destinations, which exponentially increased tourist numbers. The Turin-based car company Fiat played a critical role in transforming Italy into both a car-loving country and an industrialized state.29 Founded in 1899 by Giovanni Agnelli, the company blended familybased ownership with Fordist techniques of production. It was familyrun capitalism at its best. In the 1920s Fiat produced approximately 40,000 vehicles per year, or 90 per cent of all cars in Italy. By 1950 this figure had doubled to more than 100,000, and by 1966 production had risen to over 1.6 million vehicles. According to John Foot, this rapid rise stemmed from both market deregulation and the production of cheap, utilitarian cars like the Cinquecento.30 Indeed, Fiat’s commercial success was linked to its critical role in helping to motorize Italy. Widespread car ownership made for unprecedented mobility among Italians, or, as Piero Baitani noted about the invention of the Fiat Seicento (600) model:31 Erano ormai finiti, con l’arrivo della «600», i tempi in cui la maggioranza degli italiani si spostava una sola volta nella vita, per emigrare o per prestare servizio militare. Con questo nuovo balzo in avanti della motorizzazione, molti italiani cominciarono a far esperienza della libertà e del piacere di muoversi e di comunicare, di uscire dal perimetro geografico e psicologico della routine quotidiana. Cominciò, per molti, la «scoperta dell’Italia». (With the arrival of the “600,” the times were over in which the majority of Italians moved just once in their lives, to emigrate or for military service. With this new step forward in motorization, many Italians began to

136  The Beautiful Country experience the liberty and pleasure of travel and of communication themselves, escaping from geographical and psychological limits of their daily routine. Many began to “discover Italy itself.”)

Thus, middle-class Italians drove their new Fiat 600s to partake of allinclusive vacations at seaside resorts, thermal baths, and mountain villages, that is, to experience the recently commodified touristic spaces of destination Italy. These spaces became ever more accessible, too, with the creation of the Autostrada del Sole, the preferred route of these motorized Italian journeys. Construction began on the Autostrada del Sole in April 1956 (figure 5.2). With its planned route from Milan to Naples, the highway was one of the most important developments for automobile-based tourism in Italy as destination. It was the primary vector along which middleclass Italians could travel the country further and faster than ever before.32 The multi-lane highway – which still exists today as the A1 – represented the first long-distance artery on which cars could travel at sustained speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour. For inspiration, Italian planners turned to the United States, in particular the expansion of the Interstate Highway System constructed by the Eisenhower administration. In a 1951 article published in Le Vie d’Italia, Bruno Bolis praised American highways as “ideal streets” because they were made expressly for automobiles. He dreamed of such freeways for Italy: “In America le strade sono nate con l’automobile e per l’automobile, e sono molto up to date … vediamo un po’ di sognarci la strada ideale, una strada giovane bella fresca e comoda come un’Alfa o un’Aurelia presentata in un Salone, una strada in tutto e per tutto moderna e razionalissima” (In America the streets were born with the car and for the car, and are very up to date … let’s dream for a bit about the ideal street: a young, beautiful, fresh and comfortable street, like an Alfa or an Aurelia presented in  a showroom, a modern and rational street in all respects).33 Bolis’s dream was realized, in part, when the first tract of the Autostrada del Sole, from Milan to Piacenza, was completed in 1958. The entire highway was finished in 1964, just a few months behind schedule. With its multiple lanes, elevated speed limits, emergency turn-offs, rest stops, tunnels, and bridges, the highway represented the most significant advancement in the Italian infrastructure of motorization. The Touring Club Italiano was deeply invested in the success of the highway, not least because of its importance for domestic tourism but also because of its pragmatic reinforcement of the club’s authority in

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overseeing roadway signage. TCI publications detailed each step of the construction and made clear that the project was very much bound up with Italy’s post-war reinvention of itself as a modern industrialized state. For example, in a 1957 article Cesare Biffi declared the highway “un’arteria nuova, di modernità per noi inedita, lunga 738 chilometri e del costo di 185 miliardi di lire” (a new artery of modernity for us, unedited, 738 kilometres long and at the cost of 185 billion lire).34 Italians, he asserted, should use their cars to experience this transformed Italy (figure 5.3), and along the way they should also stop at one of the edifices built to accommodate them: the motel. Italy’s first motels opened in November 1954. Built by the Automobile Club d’Italia (ACI, or Italian Automobile Club), two motels opened in Calabria that year: one in the town of Tiriolo and the other in Vibo Valentia. These ACI-run motels, known as autostelli, were intended as short-stay accommodations where travellers could also service their vehicles. Each motel had a panoramic view, lodgings, a garage, a restaurant, and a bar. The service station giant Agip also constructed a competing chain of motels in the mid-1950s. Whereas tourists stayed for several days at the ACI-managed autostelli, Agip motels were directed towards overnight motorists. Agip motels were less costly too, running at 800–1500 lire per night, compared to 1200–2100 lire at an ACI autostello.35 By 1957 more than twenty-five motels had been opened, and a chain was being planned along the entire Autostrada del Sole. Interestingly, the ACI built the majority of its first motels in southern Italy, garnering investment from the Cassa par il Mezzogiorno (Southern Development Fund) with the aim of valorizing the south as a tourist destination.36 These motels represented an incipit of the south as a touristic brand. One decade later this impulse would take a different built form in the beachside resort complex, giving life to the domestic villaggio turistico (holiday village) and its related culture of villeggiatura (holiday making). Yet generally in this moment the motels, highways, and automobiles not only transformed the Italian landscape but also changed the way that both Italian and foreign tourists experienced destination Italy. Stefano Pivato argued that the car and the highway constituted another common locus for Italian unification, that is, “un nuovo modo di fare gli italiani” (a new way to make Italians).37 Italian tourists shared in the experience of staying at motels, eating at autogrills (figure 5.4), and travelling the highway; these were collective touring practices that enabled tourists to imagine a unified Italy by way of increasingly homogenized

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5.2, 5.3, and 5.4  In Italy an extensive infrastructure of highways, motels, and rest stops emerged with the rise of the automobile. On the facing page (5.2 and 5.3): a portion of the Autostrada del Sole, early 1960s, and the popular Fiat 500 (“Topolino”) and camper, 1950s; above (5.4): the first Autogrill near Milan in 1959. Photos reproduced by permission from the Touring Club Italiano Archive, Milan.

experiences on the highway. While cars and motels transformed touristic practices on the peninsula in the 1950s, the tourism industry as a whole would be completely revolutionized just a few years later with the advent of charter flights and jumbo jets that brought with them an unprecedented deluge of tourists from across the globe. Aeroplanes and Charter Flights Charter flights first appeared in Europe immediately following the Sec­ ond World War as tour operators in Great Britain employed ex-­military planes and pilots to fly paying passengers to predetermined destinations. Tour companies rented a plane, decided on a destination, and then sold tickets at prices far below that of commercial airlines, the latter

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being restricted by IATA (International Air Transport Associa­tion) regulations. While charters operated on much tighter margins than did  commercial airlines, if they filled every seat they could be quite profitable.38 The first documented charter flight landed in Corsica in 1949. However, middle-class tourists did not commonly use charters until a decade later when they were combined with the room and board of the all-inclusive package tour.39 Changes in airline regulations and the formation of a new licensing board led to a rapid boom in charter tour operators in the early 1960s. For example, in 1962 the Air Transport Licensing Board (ATLB) in the United Kingdom processed almost one thousand applications to offer all-inclusive tours.40 Charter airlines were no longer the small ad hoc operations that they had been after the war; they had emerged as conglomerates that rivalled commercial airlines, both in terms of passengers and financial capital. What is more, the airline industry experienced a technological revolution in the 1960s with the invention of the jet engine (figure 5.5). Aircraft could fly farther and faster, so that charter tour companies could offer, for instance, up to three return flights per day from the United Kingdom to the Balearic Islands. Spain, and Majorca in particular, became the main destination for European charter tourism. In 1950 the Balearic Islands documented ninety-eight thousand tourists, and that number had risen to two million by 1965.41 Advances in civil aviation – the engines of aeroplanes evolved from piston engines to turboprops and finally to jet engines, and the aeroplanes themselves from narrow to wide bodies – not only allowed charter flights to transport greater numbers of tourists but also enabled tourists to come from further abroad on the new jet-powered aircraft. Computerized reservation systems that were brought online in the late 1960s also organized these masses in the air and on the ground.42 The jets emerged as the loci of a new textual genre that, like the guidebook, perpetuated a particular image of a tourist destination: the in-flight magazine. Air travellers were captive audiences. While the foremost goal of these magazines was to promote the airline’s corporate image and its global reach, they also circulated and reinforced cultural stereotypes. These stereotypes, however, were deliberately crafted in so far as the magazines were and are “ideal site[s] in which countries or cities can advertise and thereby produce themselves.”43 The in-flight magazine combined text and image (a montage once again) with destination imaginaries and corporate interests to mediate a

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5.5  Alitalia plane with passengers, 1960s. The advent of commercial air travel changed the nature of both domestic and international tourism in Italy. Photo reproduced by permission from the Touring Club Italiano Archive, Milan.

“global semioscape” that not only routinized but also disavowed the inequities of globalization.44 Indeed, these magazines celebrated the privileged lifestyle of an emergent mobile elite. Yet at this moment in the 1960s such a global class was still in its infancy. Middle-class British and northern European tourists chose the Costa del Sol or Majorca, while bourgeois Americans arrived in destination Italy. Some Americans had been there as soldiers during the Second World War and wanted to return; others saw the films Roman Holiday (1953) and La dolce vita (1960) and came to see “Hollywood on the Tiber.”45 Still others came back to the homeland of their relatives who had emigrated to the United States decades earlier. By the mid1960s an estimated fifty thousand American expatriates lived in Italy, and some one million package tourists arrived from the United States each year. “When the first 707s touched down at Ciampino [airport in

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Rome],” wrote Erik Amfitheatrof, “that was the real revolution: New York was only eight hours away.”46 Amfitheatrof also noted that jetage tourism broke down the remaining class barriers in travel because American package tourists came from all socio-economic backgrounds. One was just as likely to find backpacking students along with moneyed art collectors on these transatlantic jumbo jets. Many Americans also took pride in seeing first-hand Italy’s post-war recovery, knowing that the United States, via the Marshall Plan, had contributed to that economic miracle.47 Yet Americans were not the only tourists coming to Italy on an allinclusive package tour; there were millions of others doing the same at  almost every other resort setting across the Mediterranean, from Torremolinos to Rimini. The influx of tourism-related revenue, coupled with profits from other industrial sectors, led to a meteoric rise in standards of living and monetary incomes for most Italians and enabled them to start travelling. By the mid-1960s Italian tourist masses were also on the move. All-Inclusive Italy: New Practices of Domestic Tourism With the advent of the package tour in the 1960s, middle-class Italians travelled en masse to newly developed holiday resorts (villaggi turistici). A culture of villeggiatura (holiday making), with its dedication to sun worship, beach life, and collective recreation, came to define the Italian domestic tourism sector not only then but also today. These resorts played a dual role: (1) they proved to be the favoured destinations of middle-class Italian tourists, and (2), they economically bolstered the underdeveloped south, or Mezzogiorno. Of the latter, it was clear that the southern question – and the potential for economic development – yet again underpinned the evolution of the domestic tourism sector. Whereas the southern question once expressed concern with how to understand and assimilate the south within the context of the newly formed Italian state, when framed within the rise of villeggiatura it revealed an abiding concern with integrating the south not just into the Italian state but also into Italy as destination. Mezzogiorno development agencies financed and constructed these earliest holiday resorts, hence their locations in Calabria and Puglia. In the packaging of the south for Italian touristic consumption, the southern question informed the commodification of destination Italy, which in the post-war era came to be expressed in built form by the holiday village.

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It Takes a Village: INSUD and Valtur Holiday resorts developed more or less on an ad hoc basis in Italy throughout the 1960s, with the earliest models being funded by an organization called INSUD (Nuove Iniziative per il Sud, or New Initiatives for the South). This agency was founded in 1963 as a joint venture between the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Southern Development Fund) and the Ernesto Breda finance company with the primary goals of promoting tourism and building touristic infrastructure in the Italian south. According to Patrizia Battilani, the efforts of INSUD were part of an extraordinary government intervention to eliminate regional economic disparities.48 Although it ceased activity in 1991, INSUD invested some 40 billion lire to develop tourism throughout the Mezzogiorno over its almost thirty-year history. Much of INSUD’s financial support was directed towards Valtur, a company that constructed and managed tourist villages. In 1969, Valtur opened its first resorts in Ostuni (Puglia) and Capo Rizzuto (Calabria), which are still in operation today. The beach is the central attraction at both resorts, and their built environments facilitate the pursuit of sun, sea, and sand. At the Ostuni resort, for instance, all paths figuratively lead to the sea. Guests, laden with beach gear, stroll towards the shore down a lane shaded by tall eucalyptus trees, their crisp menthol scent mixing with the sea-salt air. Bougainvillea and bird of paradise flowers along the whitewashed walls of the resort’s central piazza hint at faraway tropical climes. Sunburnt tourists take an espresso at the beachside café before finding their places among the tessellation of lounge chairs strewn across the beach like dominoes. There are 407 rooms here, as well as restaurants, bars, a boutique, and a main entrance hall. Guests typically stay for a week or two as part of an all-inclusive package, although shorter weekend breaks are starting to prove popular. Because the resort is rather isolated geographically, guests tend to remain on the property, and the staff offers innumerable activities to keep them busy. At Valtur Ostuni, leisure is not just activity but an overload thereof. Utilitarian function also trumps aesthetic form at the holiday village. Orvar Löfgren writes that it was designed “with a precise geometry to secure maximum exposure to the sun and the sea. The fact that many tour companies today design their standard vacation villages following the style of the pioneering Club Méditerranée increases this conformity, which can be seen in the smallest details. There exists, for example, a standard plastic chair found in pool bars all over the Mediterranean.”49

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The French company Club Méditerranée, founded in 1950, was also a pioneer of holiday villages in destination Italy, opening its first in Tuscany on the Golfo di Baratti in 1952. Its clients, dubbed gentil membres (GMs), aimed for “mental and physical detoxification” at its well-appointed hideaways across the Mediterranean.50 By the 1970s, Club Med, now a large multinational corporation, dominated the European tourism industry. To maintain this market position, it acquired a 45 per cent stake in Valtur in 1976, an acquisition that both neutralized Valtur as competition and solidified Club Med’s status as one of the industry’s top leaders. The relationship between Valtur and Club Med lasted until 1997 when financial difficulties rendered the partnership unsustainable.51 In the 1990s generally, the European tourism industry faced a harsh economic climate, given the end of the cold war and the ensuing conflicts in Iraq and the Balkans. It was a climate that prompted Valtur to diversify its touristic offerings. In 1992 it formed a tour company, Valtur Viaggi, to organize all-inclusive trips, and in 1995 it entered the growing cruise industry with an all-inclusive cruise along the Nile.52 How­ ever, in spite of this diversification the core of Valtur’s present-day business remains with its holiday resorts.53 With few exceptions, resort planning and construction in destination Italy was carried out unevenly, and often negligently.54 Valtur’s successes inspired many copycats who were interested in turning a quick profit. They built abusive constructions rather than making long-term investments. For example, in Calabria between 1970 and 1980 some 240,000 buildings were constructed for touristic use, the majority of them never finished or used.55 According to Giuseppe Soriero, “La gran parte delle costruzioni [turistiche] è sorta abusivamente, attraverso una progressiva e insensata occupazione del suolo, che ha provocato sconvolgimenti ambientali irreparabili” (The better part of touristic constructions is of the illegal sort, through a progressive and senseless occupation of the land, which has caused irreparable environmental devastation).56 Fly-by-night contractors put up poorly constructed resorts that now sit empty at the beachside – decaying, concrete blights on the landscape. Unlike with these unfinished developments that were turned for a quick profit, Valtur did have long-term success with its holiday resorts. Today the company operates thirteen resorts in Italy and eleven more abroad with yearly sales upwards of €200 million.57 Other companies, like Alpitour and Hotelplan, carved out a different niche in the Italian domestic tourism market, staking their profits on all-­inclusive package tours instead of the construction of holiday resorts.

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Smooth Operators: The Case of Alpitour The mid-twentieth century marked the birth of Italian tour operators specializing in all-inclusive package tours at home and abroad. These operators offered their services directly to the public or through travel agencies, and like many other post-war Italian industries they were usually family-operated, small-scale, highly concentrated firms that faced little price competition.58 Alpitour is one of the largest and most successful of these companies, and it provides an apt case study for the domestic evolution of package tourism in destination Italy. Whereas Valtur and INSUD worked together to build holiday resorts, Alpitour organized all-inclusive trips – that is, transportation, accommodation, meals, and entertainment – to predetermined destinations. Founded by Lorenzo Isoardi in Cuneo in 1947, Alpitour began by arranging short bus and train trips (a maximum of two to three days) to destinations just over the Italian border, usually on the occasion of special events (for example, Carnival in Nice).59 What is more, the small town of Cuneo housed a great number of middle-class workers who commuted to factories in nearby Turin, and Alpitour (then known as Alpi) targeted this growing social class whose incomes and free time were both on the rise. According to Luciano Segreto, the firm’s initial strategy focused on increasing customer volume during the low season to geographically proximate destinations.60 Yet Alpitour’s rapid expansion came in the early 1960s, after it had been authorized by Alitalia airlines to sell “luxury vacation[s] at half price” (vacanza di lusso a metà prezzo), which included air travel to destinations across the Mediterranean. Just as Thomas Cook had democratized tourism in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, Alpitour and Alitalia collaborated to make all-inclusive trips accessible to middleclass Italians. According to the company’s own history, “Nasce così la formula del viaggio ‘tutto compreso,’ che consente ai turisti di visitare in completo relax le più suggestive località europee, potendo contare sulla comodità di un’organizzazione curata nei minimi dettagli” (Hence, the formula of the all-inclusive tour is born, which allows tourists to visit, in complete relaxation, the most charming places in Europe [while] relying on the comfort of an organization managed to the very last detail).61 To develop this strategy, the company dedicated a staff to setting up partnerships and inventing new tour products. Segreto added, “This new approach was no longer that of a travel agency, but that of a real tour operator, because it implied personal and direct contact with

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local tourism organizations and firms … The decision to change the name from Alpi to Alpitour in 1968 was symbolic and represented the actualization of the decision to push in the new direction.”62 In other words, Alpitour’s new tour products, intangible as they were, suggested that commodification was well at work within Italy as destination. The advent of jet travel allowed Alpitour to continuously offer novel and increasingly exotic tour products. In the 1970s charter flights across the Mediterranean and to the Canary Islands bolstered Alpitour’s bottom line and its reputation as a reliable tour operator. By the mid-1980s Alpitour had emerged as the package-tour leader of the domestic tourism sector. In just three years, 1982–4, Alpitour’s customer base increased by 80 per cent; it had 180,000 clients, who generated approximately 120  billion lire in revenue during those years.63 This was even more impressive considering the fact that domestic tourism numbers were down by 9 per cent during that same period. The tour operator’s successes in the 1980s stemmed, in part, from structural reorganization (such as chartering its own flights and setting up foreign branches).64 Yet they were also due to the company’s foray into television advertising, and in particular a slogan that stuck in the mind of many potential tourists: “Turista fai da te? No Alpitour? Ahi … ahi … ahi …!” (Do-it-yourself tourist? No Alpitour? Ahi … ahi … ahi …!”). By 1990 the company boasted 379 billion lire in revenues and 385,000 customers. Seven years later these figures almost tripled to 967 billion lire and 775,000 customers.65 The revenue numbers, however, are a bit misleading. Like many other Italian tour companies in the early 1990s, Alpitour suffered from insufficient financial resources in an increasingly unstable economy, largely owing to the fact that it had spread itself too thin financially in the previous decade as a result of poor merger decisions. Alpitour needed an infusion of capital to stay afloat. The company found its saviour in the car company Fiat, that leader of the post-war economic miracle. In 1992 the Agnelli family, the denizens of the Fiat, bought 30 per cent of Alpitour for 43.5 billion lire in cash through a holding company called Ifil. For the Agnelli family this move into the tourism industry helped to diversify their investment portfolio. Indeed, they were already experienced investors in tourism, having held both minority and majority stakes in Club Med and Valtur since the 1970s.66 For Alpitour the Agnelli cash infusion allowed a significant restructuring in which the company moved away from all-inclusive package tours and refocused its operations on the construction and management of holiday resorts. It invented the “Hotel Italian Style,” where

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Italian tourists could rest easy in a culturally familiar environment no matter where they travelled in the world. It was an Italianized tourist bubble par excellence.67 In 1998 Alpitour merged with the company Francorosso to create the largest tour operator in the domestic tourism sector. The latter’s specialization in long-distance destinations, like Polynesia and South Africa, complemented Alpitour’s predominantly Mediterranean offerings, and together they exercised a veritable monopoly on the domestic market. The Agnelli family, too, maintained a dominant market position in that they gained full control of Alpitour in the early 2000s, after the other stakeholders had sold their shares to Ifil. Although subsequent merger attempts failed (most notably with the German group Preussag and the French company Nouvelles Frontières), the Agnelli family boosted their support of Alpitour. In 2004 they sold their stake in Club Med to the Accor group in order to focus their investments on the Italian tour operator. Alpitour began like many other post-war businesses – a family-run company that developed and maximized an economic niche for a specific product, the all-inclusive package tour – but it emerged as more than just a simple tour operator; as a multi-sector conglomerate it has dominated destination Italy’s domestic tourism industry for the better part of the twentieth century. Yet its market position has been threatened, along with that of all the other tour operators and travel agencies, by the unprecedented challenges of the new physical and virtual mobilities that have revolutionized the global tourism industry in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Easy Air: The Low-Cost Carrier Revolution By the end of the 1990s, perceptions of the all-inclusive package tour like that pioneered by Alpitour began to change. No longer was it a luxury vacation to be had on a budget, but instead it had become a touristic practice reserved for lesser classes who lacked both the economic means and the cultural confidence to travel independently. For the petty bourgeoisie who once celebrated the all-inclusive vacation in the 1960s and 1970s, the package tour was no longer an accepted mode through which to acquire cultural capital and social distinction. Desti­ nations, too, shifted to reflect this trend. Many once-popular spots suffered from the so-called Torremolinos effect, in which the constant wear and tear of tourist traffic turned resort areas into tourist slums.68 Both

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the decaying holiday resort and the devaluation of the package tour mark the end stage of commodification. They are material and intangible products respectively that have been deep discounted for those who could not have previously afforded them. Much of the Mediter­ ranean coastline, as exemplified by Rimini, has been remade into one generic tourist resort, in which standardized guest services and homogenized architecture have effectively flattened and disavowed almost all cultural difference. Instead, the ability to travel independently, that is, having the prowess to arrange one’s own vacation – either on a budget or otherwise – now marks the expression (and acquisition) of cultural and symbolic knowledge and so, too, differentiates social classes. Since the 1990s the deregulation of the global airline industry and the subsequent rise of low-cost carriers (LCCs) have facilitated the growth of independent travel throughout Europe. In practice, LCCs sell tickets to short-haul destinations at a fraction of the cost of full-service carriers (FSCs) and typically offer more direct routes. One can now travel from London to Venice for as little as £8 or from Rome to Zaragoza for €6. While FSCs and charter flights still dominate the market, by 2006 they had ceded almost 20 per cent of it to LCCs.69 Likewise, the rise of Eu­ ropean LCCs also elicited changes in touristic practices, marking a shift away from long vacations to short getaways (that is, city breaks). Alessandro Cento adds, “Travelers seem to be shifting to multiple and short holidays as opposed to traditional long stays, while also the loss of the glamour involved with flying – and hence lower service levels – is accepted by many travelers nowadays.”70 LCCs sacrifice customer service and virtually all other amenities to provide customers with the lowest prices possible. The success of LCCs was only made possible with the deregulation of European civil aviation between 1988 and 1993, almost twenty-five years after that of the U.S. market.71 Prior to this agreement, state-run carriers like Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, British Airways, and Lufthansa had dominated the European airline industry. Within the European Union, deregulation had several effects: (1) it allowed carriers from one EU country to operate scheduled services between other EU members; (2) it advanced alliances between FSCs (that is, SkyTeam, Star Alliance); (3) it encouraged FSCs to reorganize their network systems into hub-and-spoke configurations; and (4), most important, it opened up opportunities for LCC growth. The first LCC, Southwest Airlines, was founded in the United States in the early 1970s and is credited for pioneering the low-cost business

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model in civil aviation. The model set low prices for passenger air service as its prime objective and achieved this by using a point-to-point network (as opposed to hub-and-spoke); secondary airports; a single aircraft fleet (to save on parts and repairs); minimal sales and reservation costs; ancillary revenue (that is, charges for luggage and boarding preferences); and no-frills service overall. As such, LCCs could operate at virtually half the costs of those of a full-service carrier.72 The first European LCC was Dublin-based Ryanair, founded in 1991, which was followed by London-based EasyJet in 1995. As they struggled to gain footholds in the European market, both companies embraced rapid technological developments, such as moving all their bookings online as early as the year 2000. Both took advantage of the exogenous shocks that crippled the conventional airline industry in the first years of the twenty-first century – the terrorist attacks of 11  Sep­ tember, the rapid rise in oil prices, and the 2003 SARS epidemic. While FSCs grappled with this brave new market world, Ryanair and EasyJet placed orders for new aircraft and expanded their operations into newly annexed EU countries. Both their passengers and their profits continued to increase, and like Southwest Airlines, these LCCs emerged as the only companies able to generate positive growth in the years when many other carriers were going bankrupt.73 They accomplished all of this, too, in spite of intense dissatisfaction among passengers, which has led to such popular nicknames as Ruinair, SleazyJet, and Southworst. Today, even after the worldwide economic downturn of 2008, both Ryanair and EasyJet have remained profitable by adjusting their routes and pricing and de-emphasizing customer service. It seems that passengers are quite willing to withstand extreme discomfort for a short-haul bargain. Within the European market Italy remains one of the most popular destinations for LCCs. In spring 2014, for instance, Ryanair operated flights to twenty-four Italian cities while Easyjet flew to seventeen, sometimes multiple times per day. In London’s Stansted airport a Ryanair flight to Rome begins with incessant waiting and frustrated travellers. Arguments erupt over baggage fees for carry-on luggage, and, at boarding, a crowd rushes the tarmac to get the best of all unassigned seats. In flight, passengers have to pay for everything, with either cash or physical discomfort, and any potential quiet moments are interrupted by constant sales pitches for duty-free shopping, lottery tickets, and charity donations. After landing, travellers, already battered and road weary, disembark at Ciampino airport to begin their Italian vacations.

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Together, Ryanair and Easyjet make up an estimated 27 per cent share of the Italian market.74 Many smaller LCCs have also gained specialized footholds, such as Belle Air (Albania), Pegasus (Turkey), and Wizz Air (Hungary); some of them were once charter airlines that transitioned to a low-cost business model. In the late 1990s and early 2000s several Italian LCCs also began operations, but few found long-term success. Carriers like Alpieagles, Club Air, MyAir, and Volare all went bankrupt within a few years. Others remained afloat by merging with FSCs, such as Air One, which partnered with first Lufthansa and then Alitalia.75 The remaining LCCs in Italy – Blu-Express and Windjet – cultivated niche markets to survive, with the former flying to mostly beach destinations outside the Mediterranean and the latter cornering the Sicilian market. For Italy as destination the low-cost carrier revolution of the earlytwenty-first century represented another iteration of the Grand Tour, but one that is highly commodified, mobilized, and fragmented. With the advent of LCCs, one can now “do” destination Italy in increments – a weekend in Rome here, another in Venice there. For many the era of the two- or three-week all-inclusive package tour has long gone. Instead, the new Grand Tour is done by instalment, and it is up to the tourist to unify these fragments in her own narrative upon returning home. Sim­ ply put, the destination Italy of the early-twenty-first century emerges as an accretion of fleeting, short-term, inexpensive city breaks. The low-cost carrier revolution is just one expression of the physical and virtual mobility systems that have come to dominate contemporary life on the move. Changing attitudes towards work and leisure, coupled with advances in transport technologies (that is, buses, cars, aeroplanes), laid the basis for a new economy of mass tourism in the twentieth century in which Italy as destination became increasingly commodified – either as a material expression in the built environment, like the holiday resort, or as an intangible product, like the package tour or the city break. Destination Italy became fixed as an object for touristic consumption. As a result the forces of consumption, which impart taste and social distinction, unsettled the constitutive relationship between destination Italy and the modern Italian state once again. Since the mid-twentieth century foreign and Italian tourists alike have imagined and consumed destination Italy as a commodified, cohesive, idealized space of tourism, whereas the Italian political state, with more than fifty government turnovers since the Second World War, has remained in constant

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structural flux. In such ways Italy as destination has slowly assumed a position of semiotic dominance in relation to the state, and thus Italy is better apprehended today by its touristic stereotypes than by its political structures. Hence, the signifying relations between state and destination have become estranged, and this estrangement is amplified by the advent of mobility – with its physical and virtual networks – not only as a paramount ideological paradigm but also as a precondition for utopian imaginaries today.76 As Anthony Elliott and John Urry argue, “a life ‘on the move’ is viewed as a fundamental indicator of achieving ‘the good life.’ Indeed we might say that multiple mobilities have become the drivers of symbolic power, bodily habituses and pleasure-seeking lifestyles.”77 Put another way, mobility dissolves territorial borders, and this dissolution then reorders the articulations between state and destination under the broader scope of achieving a utopian good life, or la dolce vita. As a globalized commodity, Italy as destination emerges as the sign of the good life, an idealized space of tourism implicated in and realized through these mobilized networks. Thus, in the early years of the twenty-first century, destination Italy goes mobile, concretized in artificial canals, shopping malls, and suburban developments around the world. It has now become a globalized simulacrum.

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Spaces

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6 Italy without Borders: Simulacra, Simulation, and the Postmodern Grand Tour

One winter evening in New Orleans it was a surreal scene on Poydras Street. A fleet of psychedelic-neon caravels rolled down the boulevard, their jubilant fluorescence a stark contrast against the moonless night. These floats are a common sight in the city, especially around Mardi Gras, when they lope and shimmy through neighbourhoods and carry groups of revellers intent on endless merrymaking. The caravels on Poydras Street were no different. They joyously rocked back and forth. They glowed and glimmered. They blasted pulsating music that reverberated through the night air and into one’s heart. It was a party on wheels. Less than twenty metres away there stood an empty piazza also bedecked in colourful, in-your-face neon, much like the floating caravels. It is one of the foremost examples of twentieth-century postmodernist architecture: the Piazza d’Italia designed by Charles Moore. This semicircular plaza is composed of architectural fragments and façades – Roman arches and Corinthian columns, neon lights and garish colours, an abstracted black-and-white Italian peninsula of tile and brick that juts out into a fountain basin – all of which are meant to celebrate the city’s Italian immigrants. This is Moore’s postmodern interpretation of a traditional public space in Italy, the piazza, in which he deconstructs and reassembles “a dignified vocabulary of classical architecture up to date with Pop Art techniques, a post-modernist palette,” according to Heinrich Klotz. “In the tradition of the Italian ‘res publica,’ it is a place for the public to gather; yet at the same time, it does not take itself too seriously.”1 In style, Klotz adds that Piazza d’Italia “risks making the poetical statement ‘Here is Italy!’ only to add immediately, with a sad smile, ‘Italy is not here.’”2 As such, the piazza metaphorically owes its existence to a paradox: the simultaneous presence and absence of Italy.

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Built in 1978, the Piazza d’Italia embodies a montage of disparate architectural elements that are perceived to be Italian (figure 6.1). Its materials and colours are deliberately the opposite of their original forms: stainless steel for the capitals, neon lights under arches, Latin inscriptions in coloured concrete. On site the elements collide with one other, and while the piazza attempts to inscribe new, whimsical meanings onto staid forms, the greater significance of this architectural pastiche is not immediately clear. Instead, the space encompasses what Linda Hutcheon has called “[a] dialectic of past and present, of old and new, [that] gives formal expression to a belief in the possibilities of change within continuity.”3 It juxtaposes history against parody. Such appositive constellations saturate the Piazza d’Italia with an aesthetics of fragmentation, citationality, eclecticism, and temporal and spatial compression that are well-known characteristics of the postmodern.4 As with many works of postmodernist art, meaning is to be found in the project’s unresolved dissonance – the dialectical juxtaposition of forms and facades – much in the same way that Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project was meant not to be synthetic but rather to reveal and unsettle historical truth through material syncretism. Similarly with Piazza d’Italia, Moore takes montage as his constructive principle, staging architectural citations against one another so that an idea of Italy might “spring out” of the built environment without having to be inserted as interpretation.5 Yet the space of the piazza is clearly one of fantasy, born of what David Harvey calls the “theatricality of effect, and the striving for jouissance and schizophrenic effect.”6 Moore’s piazza searches for a fantasy world, an illusory high that takes one beyond current realities into pure imagination. And yes, that imaginary is Italy, but one that is already imagined from a displacement. It is a destination Italy that springs out of an historical mobility, emigration, which becomes realized in simulated form in New Orleans. As a superlative expression of montage and simulation the Piazza d’Italia guides this chapter’s exploration of the ways in which Italy as destination – now mobilized in the age of late capitalism – becomes a floating signifier of itself in the de-territorialized geographies of touristic space and accordingly how it becomes spatialized as simulacra around the globe. This is a destination Italy of surfaces and impressions, one that has caught hold of the popular imagination as well as rearranged the signifying relations that subordinate the Italian state to a semiotics of tourism. The present chapter calls attention to the largescale simulacra of Italy that have emerged outside the peninsula since

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6.1  Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, 2013, designed by architect Charles Moore and often cited by architectural historians as the first postmodern ruin. Photo by the author.

the 1980s and specifically how they reflect the completion of destination Italy’s transformation into a touristic commodity, packaged as it were for consumption by mass tourists. It juxtaposes four typically postmodern environments that signify Italy: (1) The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, (2) Mediterranean Harbor at the Tokyo DisneySea theme park, (3) the Mercato shopping mall in Dubai, and (4) the luxury suburb of Sorrento at Dublin Ranch in northern California. This chapter demonstrates the ways in which these built environments give rise to a hyperreal Italy that encapsulates the ideological forces of a globalized consumer society, and, at the same time, the ways in which this Italy masks those constellations under the vague guise of “tradition” and “authenticity.” These built forms, often faux aged to evoke a sense of historicity, recall the artisanal, the rustic, the piccole industrie (small industries) that once characterized small-scale patterns of production and consumption throughout the Italian peninsula – patterns that expressed close interpersonal relationships. This imagined Italy represents a wish image for a time and place prior to globalization, something that stands as the antithesis of the faceless anonymity and

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mass-produced merchandise that dominate industrialized society in late capitalism. Italy has come to signify the direct relations between people that are neither conditioned nor valued through commodities. In this Italy, vital people can resurface in the globalized order of things. As such, Italianate simulacra materialize hyperreal Italy, which, masquerading as a depository of authenticity and tradition, simultaneously embodies and disavows the excess consumption that defines social taste and distinction in the present day. In doing so, hyperreal Italy not only assuages the buyer’s remorse often associated with such consumption but also disavows the individual guilt of being associated with, and an instrument for, the unjust articulations of state, market, and citizenship that comprise the globalized neoliberal order.7 It covers up that guilt with a patina of leisure. What is more, hyperreal Italy exerts severe mechanisms of control to police its simulated boundaries. These simulacra demarcate yet another shift in the relationship between the modern Italian state and destination Italy. What does it mean to control a simulated territory predicated on a state founded on a constitutive paradox, much less its subjects born in and of simulation? This chapter merely hints at an answer: the sentiments of mastery and subjugation experienced at these simulacra are, in actuality, percolations of imperial debris at play in everyday life. They are markers of a salvage operation that resurrects – vis-à-vis tourism – the pleasures of imperialism once linked to colonial order. These Italianate simulacra entangle what Ann Stoler has called “imperial formations,” or the constellations of decimation, displacement, and reclamation that persist in the fiction of the post-colonial present.8 These are not the ruins of empire per se but processes that seem to have their own life breath, surfacing and disappearing and resurfacing again amid physical remains (for example, convict islands), ruined bodies (for example, landmine survivors), and damaged psyches (for example, mental disorders). Imperial formations leave material traces, yes, but they more potently operate as relations of force – allocating, reappropriating, deflecting, excluding, denying, deferring, disavowing – within the politics of the present. Hyperreal Italy simultaneously embodies, masks, and disavows the conspicuous consumption and the tragic social inequities endemic to globalization.9 In Las Vegas, Tokyo, Dubai, and California such imperial formations implicitly shape the textures of hyperreal Italy, pivoting along simulated vectors of physical and psychic, interior and exterior, miniature and gigantic, copy and original. Put another way, hyperreal Italy becomes a

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locus where post-colonial and hyperreal often converge.10 It is here that one can attend to the ways in which protracted imperial processes interact with the precessions of simulacra that constitute hyperreality. It is also here that hyperreal Italy can productively complicate the shallowness and superficiality of the postmodern with the critical ideological stakes and the very real human consequences that result from the formative, yet often oblique, articulations between colonial past and neoliberal present, now altogether mobilized in the contemporary age. And it is to this mobilized, hyperreal destination Italy that this chapter now turns its attention. Building Hyperreality: Las Vegas and the Venetian Hotel and Casino As one walks north on the Las Vegas strip, the Venetian Hotel and Casino reveals itself slowly in the heat of a spring afternoon. It comes into view piece by piece, where the strip makes its only turn: an elegant lamppost, a change in sidewalk texture, a certain slant of light on turquoise water. Suddenly one is standing in front of the Doge’s Palace, its pink-and-white tiles and gothic colonnades bespeaking the resort’s immense scale and its jumble of well-known monuments that count among them the Rialto Bridge and the Campanile (figures 6.2 and 6.3). A faux Grand Canal, shallow and chlorinated, weaves its way between these monuments, pooling in a lagoon where gondolas and gondoliers wait to ferry tourists on romantic forays. Yet, despite this grandiose exterior the Venetian imparts a sense of intimacy. The eye does not gravitate to one monument in particular but is forced to trace a path among all of them. It does not boldly declare, “I am a monument!” as many other resorts on the strip might do (for example, the giant obsidian pyramid of the Luxor).11 Instead, as Giovanna Franci writes in her study of the virtual Grand Tour in Las Vegas, “the Venetian calls attention to itself for the subtraction of its sign rather than for its imposition.”12 Franci references the casino-resort’s literal substitution of neon signs with romantic lanterns, its darkened presence vastly different at night from the phosphorescent coruscations that are typical of most buildings on the strip. Semiotically, however, the Venetian engages the monumental signifiers of Venice – such as the Doge’s Palace, the Rialto Bridge, and the Campanile – to metonymically infuse the casino-resort with a semblance of authenticity. With these signs the Venetian does indeed declare, “I am a monument!” Precisely, it announces, “I am Venice!” but a Venice that has been displaced from its original location.

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6.2 and 6.3  Famous monuments, like the Campanile and the Rialto Bridge (left, 6.2) and the Ca D’Oro (right, 6.3), mark venezianità (Venetianness) at the Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, 2013. Photos by the author.

Fake Authenticity, Authentic Fakery At the Venetian, signs of venezianità bombard all visitors. It is a site of such authentic fakery that it creates a suspension of disbelief.13 One American tourist visiting the casino-resort compared it to Venice, as if both were the same, remarking, “Well, this is just like Venice, too … these stairs over here.” Indeed, the crowds at the Venetian are remarkably similar to those that swarm Venice on any hot summer afternoon. The narrow alleys of the Venetian’s Grand Canal Shoppes are often as packed as the narrow alleyways between Piazza San Marco and the Rialto Bridge. Like Venice, too, souvenir shops and restaurants line these passageways, garishly decorated with carnival masks and coloured glass. In 2012 more than thirty-nine million tourists visited Las

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Vegas, most of them Americans, who stayed there for four days on average. Almost all came to Las Vegas for pleasure, and 84 per cent of them were repeat visitors.14 Put another way, almost forty million tourists could have likely experienced a dislocated, hyperreal Venice in 2012, even if they were only walking through the resort – many of them for a second or third time. That is almost equal to the forty-six million tourists who visited Italy in the same year.15 In such ways the Venetian emerges as a dominant model not only of Venice but also of destination Italy among the contemporary spaces of globalization. What is more, Jonathan Culler notes that tourists are interested in everything that is a sign of itself; they are unsung armies of semioticians.16 Since the act of collecting signs is the tourist’s primary impulse, the Venetian readily stages signs of venezianità for touristic consumption. These signs stage an authentic fakery that masquerades as authenticity.17 Millions of tourists come to Las Vegas to see the fake. From a replica of the Eiffel Tower to one of a medieval castle, the fake is the hallmark of the Vegas experience. To experience the fake is to experience authentic Las Vegas, hence the tourist’s search for authentic fakery there (as opposed to, say, the search for the fake authenticity in Santa Fe, New Mexico). Any claim to the reality of history is secondary to commercial profit in Vegas, and what is manufactured as heritage (for example, the Eiffel Tower, the Manhattan skyline, and the Grand Canal) is done for touristic consumption.18 It then becomes a question of “engazement,” according to Nezar AlSayyad, or “the transformation of the material reality of a built environment into a cultural imaginary.”19 What cultural imaginary of Venice, then, is being constructed in the built environment of the Venetian? The immediate answer, of course, would be that the Venetian invokes Venice as destination. When building the casino-resort between 1997 and 1999, billionaire developer Sheldon Adelson issued a mandate of authenticity, wanting to reproduce everything exactly as it was in Venice, to such an extent that he hired glassblowers from Murano and flew in other Italian artists to recreate works by Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto.20 Yet, despite these illusory proclamations of authenticity, one finds evidence of supreme authentic fakery just under the surface at the Venetian. Inside, visitors stroll along a faux Grand Canal and shop and dine under an artificial, air-conditioned sky that mimics sunset and sunrise every couple of hours. One encounters carabinieri (policemen) and gondoliers who do not speak Italian but who do speak English with phony Italian accents. The fake stone alleyways are

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compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and all of the gondolas have seatbelts. In this Italianate simulacrum all Italian cultural knowledge need not apply. Vegas = Venice The Venetian in Las Vegas sells all manner of material objects (for example, carnival masks) and immaterial experiences (for example, gondola rides) that are meant to evoke a “true” experience of Venice as destination while also generating profits. Venice and its culture have been commodified par excellence. The casino-resort also engages in the rhetoric of authenticity to assure visitors of its value while laying out its cultural claims. It does so through text, that is, its own Resort Guide and other hotel brochures. For example, the Resort Guide discusses Venice’s history in the here and now:21 “You are invited to relish the ageless history, inspiring architecture, and ambience of Venice – to stroll through the magnificent arched hallways and streets that have inspired artists, poets, and romantics for centuries … This directory has been prepared as a guide to the astounding colonnades of the Doge’s Palace, through the neighborhoods and palazzi of The Grand Canal Shoppes to St. Mark’s Square. Experience the gondolas of the Adriatic Sea and the beauty of the mastery of art displayed liberally for your pleasure.” In the familiar didactic voice of the guidebook the text tells visitors how to see and consume the Venetian. It does not distinguish between the simulacrum of Venice and the city itself. As far as the text is concerned, visitors to the Venetian will marvel at the actual Doge’s Palace and ride real gondolas on the Adriatic Sea. Copy and original become interchangeable: Venice is Vegas, and vice versa. In another brochure the Venetian entices visitors with promises of authenticity. The text proclaims: “[By] faithfully recreating the aura and ambience of the fabled Italian city, The Venetian will transport you not only to another place, but to another time as well. From the detailed frescoes of the Great Hall to the serenading gondoliers winding their way down the Grand Canal, every breathtaking detail has been carefully attended to … Benvenuto!” The brochure intersperses Italian phrases (such as benvenuto, guida al centro commerciale) as linguistic markers of the Venetian’s authenticity. It employs literary references to the Grand Tour to underscore this staged authenticity, quoting Lord Byron on its verso: “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; … I saw from out the wave her structures rise as from the stroke of an enchanter’s wand.” This quote by one of the most famous Grand Tourists,

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along with the image of the enchanter’s wand, is no doubt an allusion to the developer Adelson himself. It was his wand, or his US$2.5 billion, that conjured this new destination Venice up from the sands of the Nevada desert. Yet the brochure omits the full text of Byron’s poem, which is excerpted from canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). The poem describes the travels of a disillusioned young man looking for distraction in foreign lands.22 Its fourth canto might also be considered a sort of poetic Grand Tour, as the Byron poet moves between Venice, Florence, and Rome on this part of the pilgrimage. The canto opens with a description of Venice as a city that is no longer marvellous but is one of dying glory: I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; A palace and a prison on each hand; I saw from out the wave of her structure’s rise As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand: A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles O’er the far times, when many a subject land Look’d to the winged Lion’s marble pines, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles. (IV.1)

Here Byron’s poetic Venice stands opposed to the highly edited, romanticized version presented in the Venetian’s brochure. While the brochure includes the three lines of the first quatrain, of particular interest is the omission of the poem’s second line – “a palace and a prison on each hand” – breaking both the poem’s heroic verse structure and rhyme. The most sensible explanation for this omission is that, while the Venetian does not hesitate to consider itself a palace – indeed, its new expansion is called the Palazzo (palace) – it does not eagerly advertise itself as a prison, even though it is much closer to the latter than the former. It is a highly controlled and tightly policed space, masquerading under the twinned guises of leisure and authenticity, where unruly subjects are not at all tolerated. Simulacra and Surveillance In practice, the Venetian is much like a prison. One cannot be a flâneur here, for movements are intensely watched and controlled at the casinoresort. It functions as a giant panopticon. A multitude of cameras are

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always watching, tracking every minute detail from the moment a person walks into the casino. They create a gaze that is alert everywhere.23 Movement is so controlled here that it reiterates the point of Pauliina Raento and Steven Flusty that the egalitarian freedom of an individual tourist is but an illusion in Las Vegas.24 The Venetian, like all casino-resorts, employs bodily disorientation as a powerful control mechanism. It overloads a visitor’s senses visually, aurally, and haptically. For example, the casino – with its open floor plan, uniform fluorescent lighting, lack of clocks, and never-ending aisles of cacophonous slot machines – is designed to make visitors lose all sense of time and place. It hermetically seals them off from the outside world and, in doing so, suspends the reality of everyday life. In a sense, too, the casino-resort becomes a non-place, which Marc Augé defines as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.”25 It is a transitory space, a space of suspension. This suspension is only amplified by the intense activities of shopping and gambling, which also contribute to the body’s inability to orient itself cognitively in such environments. The Venetian’s simulated architecture disorients its visitors to an even greater extreme, in so far as it metaphorically transports them beyond the casino, to an elsewhere in time and space: Venice as destination. The simulation is so precise that some tourists do not realize that the interior skies are artificial and believe themselves to be outdoors.26 This metaphorical journey to Venice, and the associated spatial and temporal disorientation of the visitor’s body, is further complicated by the reproduction of the Venetian in Macao, which opened in 2007. On this island off the Hong Kong coast there exists a simulacrum of a simulacrum: a Venice copied from Las Vegas. Like its American counterpart, the Venetian-Macao reconstructs the same jumble of recognizable monuments on the Cotai strip: the Campanile abuts the Rialto Bridge, and the Doge’s Palace is found near the Ca D’Oro. Inside, the casino-resort reconstructs the Las Vegas version of the Grand Canal, where visitors can shop and ride gondolas under artificial skies.27 In 2012 more than twenty-eight million tourists visited Macao – and likely this simulated version of Venice – 90 per cent of them from mainland China and Hong Kong.28 Put another way, the Venetian-Macao metaphorically transports its visitors to a double elsewhere: Venice and Vegas. This simulacrum exerts control over tourists by dislocating them to simultaneous, in-between geographies, which in this case are Macao, Las Vegas, and Venice. With the Venetian-Macao, destination Italy, too,

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begins to gain purchase in what might be thought of as an “Eastern” touristic imagination. It is through a simulacrum such as this that Chinese tourists experience and learn about Italy. This might also have inspired the growing numbers of Chinese tourists travelling to Italy as destination.29 Indeed, to attract more high-spending tourists from China – soon to become the world’s largest source market for outbound tourism – the Italian Ministry of Tourism maintains a Chinese-language website and opened an office in Beijing in 2010.30 Learning from simulacra, however, is no easy feat. The VenetianMacao and the Venetian in Las Vegas command their visitors – ever so subtly through architecture, brochures, and surveillance cameras – how to move, how to experience, and, most important, how to consume Venice and, broadly, Italy as destination. In another sense, hyperreal Italy stands in for a new form of prison, where discipline and punishment are now masked by the consumption of la dolce vita. In the macroscopic these are operations whereby simulation converges with imperial formations in the contemporary, which also happen to take a similar but increasingly commodified form at yet another exacting copy of destination Italy, this one at the Tokyo DisneySea theme park. Italy as Utopia: Mediterranean Harbor at Tokyo DisneySea Japan proves to be the site of an unparalleled intersection between control, commodification, and simulacrum: a site where Italy encounters the ultimate broker of hyperreality – Disney – in a place called Mediter­ ranean Harbor, at the theme park Tokyo DisneySea. Indeed, Disney has a long history of manipulating the built environment. All of its theme parks blend fantasy and history and are predicated on the oversimplification and reproduction of imaginary environments, most often to create a sense of nostalgia. Disneyland is the perfect model for the entangled orders of simulacra, according to Jean Baudrillard.31 It has become a critical geography for scholars of the postmodern, hyperreality, and simulation, having been categorized, for instance, by Baudrillard as a “space of regeneration of the imaginary”; by Louis Marin as a “degenerate utopia”; and by Umberto Eco as “an allegory of consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, a place of total passivity [where] its visitors must agree to behave like robots.”32 In his well-known analysis of Disneyland, Michael Sorkin describes how the theme park, and the broader process of “Disneyfication,” “is constantly poised in a condition of becoming, always someplace that is

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‘like’ someplace else.”33 Disney thus inscribes utopia on the terrain of the familiar – it is the “happiest place on earth” – by inventing a place that concretizes the ephemeral reality of signifying systems into the stuff of the city, or otherwise materializes a semiotics of tourism. Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983 and was patterned after the Disneyland in Los Angeles.34 Since its opening, the park has emerged as one of the most popular tourist attractions in Japan with eighteen million visitors annually, making it the busiest Disney theme park in the world. In September 2001 Tokyo DisneySea, a nautically inspired park, opened next door. This, too, was incredibly successful. In 2009 both parks together attracted twenty-seven million visitors, 97 per cent of them Japanese, and generated more than US$3.9 billion in revenues.35 Even with the devastating earthquake, tsunami, and meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in March 2011, theme-park visits held steady at twenty-five million that year.36 Tokyo DisneySea occupies approximately two hundred acres in Urayasu, a municipality that sits on the northwestern edge of Tokyo Bay. The theme park makes the ocean its leitmotif, and it is organized around seven different seaside ports.37 Compared to Disneyland, it aims for a more adult clientele with high-end restaurants, a luxury hotel, and a notable absence of life-size cartoon characters. It is not a water park in the conventional sense, as there are no water slides, log rides, or lazy rivers. Nor are there any attempts to recreate recognizable monuments. There is, however, an expressly Italian aesthetic that dominates the park. Simply put, Italy anchors this leisure space. A Significance for Italy, or Learning from Disney Entering Tokyo DisneySea is like taking a walk through a Tuscan hill town. The stone buildings with their tile rooftops appear aged and haphazardly juxtaposed, as if they had been constructed over centuries without a city plan. Once through the entrance, one arrives at Mediterranean Harbor, a huge lagoon flanked by a pastiche of Italian environments (figures 6.4 and 6.5). The harbour’s pastel-coloured buildings are meant to echo the Ligurian Riviera, and Portofino specifically. Elsewhere in the harbour, olive trees and grapevines evoke central Italy, as does a surprising copy of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, which is composed of elements that might be found on a postcard of Tuscany, like ochre-coloured houses and red geraniums on windowsills. Across the lagoon there are remnants of marble columns, situated next to what seems to be an abandoned Roman aqueduct, crumbling with age.

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6.4 and 6.5  Italy emerges as the referent for leisure at Tokyo DisneySea, 2005. Top (6.4): The theme park’s entrance resembles a Tuscan hill town; bottom (6.5): Venice at Tokyo DisneySea captures the city’s decadence. Photos by the author.

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Yet the clearest referent to Italy here is Venice. Contrary to the Venetian, this Venice is not a jumble of monuments; it is a series of canals, bridges, and passageways that set a perfect photographic stage. Everything about this Venice has been artfully aged, from the mould growing on the embankments to the striped gondola poles seemingly distressed by years of use. The buildings appear to have exposed bricks and numerous cracks in them, as if weathered by time. This simulacrum engages Venice’s physical decadence (rather than its famous monuments) as its simulative impetus; its decadent historicity infuses the built environment. At the centre of this Venice, as in its Italian counterpart, lies the gondola ride. Visitors to Tokyo DisneySea flock to the isola del gondoliere (gondolier island) where they wait to take a gondola ride with almost a dozen other people. The gondola is undoubtedly the prime instrument through which destination Venice and its hyperreal iterations are experienced. Robert Davis and Garry Marvin note that “if Venice has the distinction of being an archetype of itself, then the gondolier [and the gondola are] the master icon[s] of Venice and indeed, a key synecdoche of tourism itself. Even reduced to a few sketchy lines, floating on a neutral background and without landscape references, the gondolier and gondola that haunt walls, menus, ads, and clip art around the world have the power to conjure up such touristic ideals as graceful servility, relaxed luxury, arcane skills, and unobtrusive knowledge.”38 It is precisely this signification that is implied throughout the Tokyo DisneySea gondola ride. The ride always follows the same pattern: a welcome and a brief Italian lesson learning to say buon giorno (good day) and ciao (hello), a trip out to the edge of the lagoon, and finally a serenade by a gondolier. As the gondola travels out to the lagoon, those on the ride often yell “ciao” to other visitors standing on embankments, who respond in kind with another robust “ciao.” At the end of the ride everyone is sent off with an arrivederci (goodbye). The Italian language is everywhere in Mediterranean Harbor. In addition to the phrases learned on the gondola ride, almost all of the signs are written in Italian instead of Japanese or English as they are elsewhere in the park. There are Italian names for topography, such as the canale d’amore (canal of love), sottopassaggio Minni (Minnie’s underpass), and Via Paperino (Donald Duck Way). Even the bathrooms are labelled signori (gentlemen) and belle donne (beautiful women). The souvenir shops sell Disney-branded Italian products, such as Mickey Italiano pasta and olive oil. Souvenirs, and the processes of commodification

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they represent, are ever present at Tokyo DisneySea. The souvenir shops reify Japanese gift culture (omiyage) in so far as the giving and receiving of gifts, particularly those related to travel, reinforces the bonds between social networks. Here one can purchase myriad objects emblazoned with Italian signifiers like gondolas, Vespas, and the Roman Colosseum; however, the Italy for sale here is distinctly branded as Disney. At Mediterranean Harbor, destination Italy reaches another level of commodification in simulation: not only is it an object for touristic consumption, as it was with the all-inclusive package tour, but it is also materialized in miniature as a souvenir and, in so doing, becomes a metonym of itself.39 Yet theme parks have long been training grounds to prepare Japanese tourists for international travel. Tokyo DisneySea presents visitors with a scaled-down Grand Tour, similar to that of Las Vegas but one that has been “Disneyfied.” Here destination Italy has been simplified into a simulated mash-up of Venice, Tuscany, Liguria, and Rome. Japanese tourists learn what to buy and what to eat, behaving as if they were touring Italy. Indeed, 1.4 million Japanese tourists visited Italy in 2011, a figure that has held relatively steady since 2004.40 They have indeed learned from Disney.41 Better yet, Disney teaches through subtle mechanisms of control. One of its more potent mechanisms is the photograph spots that are sponsored by Fujifilm and scattered throughout the park, especially in Mediterranean Harbor. Shaped like arrows, these signs point to picturesque views and dictate to visitors what to see and photograph. In such ways the park maintains strict control over not only how destination Italy is simulated within the built environment but also how it should be viewed and consumed. These photograph spots designate Italian signifiers that, in turn, constitute a montage of destination Italy instantiated by a complex of souvenirs, guidebooks, photographs, and videos, along with tourist gazes and glances. They realize a semiotics of tourism. And if simulacra are montage factories, as Baudrillard argues, then Tokyo DisneySea is a montage factory for Italy as destination – a hyperreality predetermined by Disney and resurrected through actual touristic practices. Therefore, a photograph spot that marks a gondola and bridge at Tokyo DisneySea determines a similar view that ought to be seen and photographed in Venice. As such, this Japanese theme park both informs contemporary touring practices and rearranges the limits of destination Italy, resurrecting not reality but hyperreality on the spot. It is a rearrangement that continually destabilizes

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the signifying relations between state and destination, for not only is the state subordinate to hyperreal destination here – in fact, it is almost entirely absent – but these relations also have been subject to extreme commodification. Hyperreal Italy subsumes and actualizes Italy as destination in commodity form – instantiated, objectified, miniaturized, and Disneyfied, for instance, in the form of Donald Duck biscotti or a Mickey Italiano juice glass. But objects are not all that become estranged in simulation; elsewhere, as in Dubai, hyperreal Italy becomes the very encasement for a temple of commodities itself. Consuming Italy: The Mercato Shopping Mall, Dubai If there is any place on earth besides Las Vegas and Disneyland that can be defined by its simulacra, it is the city state of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai fastidiously cultivates its reputation as a dreamworld of conspicuous consumption (aka “Do Buy”) and a playground for the uber-rich. Here all manner of excess abounds: from unfathomable wealth and monumental architecture on the one hand to unspeakable poverty and gross exploitation on the other. Its goal is to become a luxury-consumer paradise, especially for Middle Eastern and South Asian visitors, and to do so, writes Mike Davis, “[Dubai] must ceaselessly strive for visual and environmental excess.”42 To that end, this tiny, arid city state brims with mega-projects that border on the surreal – artificial archipelagos of islands shaped like palms and sold as exclusive real estate (the Palm Jumeirah); the world’s tallest building at 2,717 feet (Burj Khalifa); a full-size indoor ski area located in one of the city’s many shopping complexes (Ski Dubai at Mall of the Emirates); and a self-proclaimed seven-star hotel (Burj Al Arab), where expected visitors are not only greeted with dates and rose water but also followed around so that staff can wipe any errant fingerprints from its interior glass walls. The Tradition of Consumption With its simulated landscapes Dubai feels very much like the hybrid of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. According to Davis, the city state learned from the latter by engaging in perverse, over-the-top architectural gigantism (a symptom of economies in speculative overdrive) that produces “a hallucinatory pastiche of the big, the bad, and the ugly.”43 Among its hyperreal edifices there exists another Italian simulacrum,

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modest by Dubai standards, which is dedicated entirely to consumption – the Mercato (market) shopping mall. Unlike the Venetian or Tokyo DisneySea, this Italy makes shopping its singular focus. There are no gondola rides to experience, no glass blowing to watch, no olive trees to contemplate. It is a temple of commodities par excellence. The Mercato uses its built environment as well as the rhetoric of the good life to conflate hyperreal Italy with vague notions of tradition, authenticity, and leisure, which again become the means to assuage any guilt associated with the excess consumption of the globalized neoliberal order. A mid-size shopping centre, the Mercato has an exterior facade that explodes in a pastiche of architectural styles and pastel colours: Venetian Gothic windows collide with a bricked-in loggia; a faux stone palazzo (palace) abuts mint-green Palladian arches; and an ornate, multi-­ coloured campanile (bell tower) anchors the complex’s southern end (figures 6.6 and 6.7). Ornate street lamps light the parking lot, and a giant fountain marks the entrance to the mall. Like Main Street in Disneyland, the mall’s upper levels appear to diminish in scale, creating a forced perspective that lends a sense of intimacy to this massive architectural form.44 And like that of Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, the facade of the Mercato cites well-known Italian monuments such as Florence’s Campanile di Giotto and Venice’s Palazzo Contarini-Fasan. The mall was financed by the Al Zarouni Group and designed by the company Retail International for approximately US$110 million (Dh400 million), and opened in 2002. The specialty theme – Italy – was decided upon after several weeks of market research in the UAE, according to Simon Thompson, the managing director of Retail Interna­ tional.45 “Any theme should not be so precise as to resemble a theme park,” Thompson said. “Neither by design nor default should it become a caricature or pastiche of accepted land marks or cities like Venice or London’s Tower Bridge.”46 Yet architecturally the Mercato becomes just that: pastiche. It replaces depth with surface, an operation that Fredric Jameson described as intrinsic to postmodernism. It becomes a pastiche, a blank parody, which appears to imitate a “historically original modern thing.”47 The Mercato, and Dubai in general, embraces the pastiche, for it freely borrows architecture from all world capitals.48 But here all structures are infused with excess. Tellingly, one can view from the Mercato the excessive spires of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, rising up in the distance. The pastiche continues inside the Mercato. The entrance leads into an enormous atrium, flanked by facades recalling the vernacular

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6.6 (top) and 6.7 (bottom)  The Mercato shopping centre in Dubai is a pastiche of Italianate architectural styles and pastel colours, 2008. Photos by the author.

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architecture of Venice and rural Tuscany. A giant fresco depicting Venice’s Grand Canal sits above the entrance, and from there the gaze is drawn to escalators disguised as parallel halves of the Rialto bridge. A Starbucks café occupies the atrium’s middle space, while retail stores are tucked among its arches and colonnades. The majority of stores sell brands that are recognized worldwide, their logos inscribed upon Italianate forms. Topshop hovers under a brick archway. A Costa Coffee sign hangs under an eave of faux tiles. The world is truly flat at the Mercato, as all material forms of globalization, from clothing to cuisine, seem to be present here.49 In this space, too, Italy becomes a referent for the contested notions of tradition and authenticity in the radically postmodern environment of Dubai. While it evokes architectural historicity in form, the mall boasts the cleanliness and shine of what is brand new. Its sanitized hallways have Italian names like Corso Italia and Via Roma, and they are conspicuously well lit and litter free. Italy acts as a prism through which the Mercato becomes linked to a sense of tradition, or heritage, which even in its most counterfeit form – the facade of a shopping centre – intimates authenticity to help ease the tension and guilt of excess consumption. Put differently, the Mercato is a site that mythologically resolves contradictions and contemporary anxieties about globalization by activating Italy as a referent for tradition.50 Italy signifies a time and a place – a wish image – wherein relations between people are neither conditioned nor valued through commodification. Consumers, under the impression of recourse to this wish image, feel better about worshipping at this Italianate commodity temple, one of the many “ends of tradition” found in the age of globalization.51 Indeed, the Porto Vecchio Village within the Mercato provides an excellent example of this signification. It is a miniature mall within the mall, a smaller, intimate space with low ceilings and faux cobblestone corridors. Instead of brand-name goods, the stores here sell antiques, ­carpets, and gold, as would a typical Arab suq (market). Even its name, Porto Vecchio Village (Old Port Village) connotes a pre-­globalization economy based on small-scale industry and interpersonal relationships. A piazza lies at the centre of this village, too. It is lined with stores; has a second storey of fake residences, complete with a forced perspective of shuttered windows, balconies, and doors; and is covered with a cirrus-stained artificial sky just like that of the Venetian in Las Vegas. In form the Mercato attempts to distance itself from its postmodern milieu, Dubai, by cloaking itself in a traditional one, Italy.

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Yet its hyperreal constitution materializes in even the most deliberately traditionalized of its environments. Indeed, the masquerade of tradition falls apart with any view of the Mercato’s commodities on display in so far as these are the unequivocal products of a globalized supply chain made present for conspicuous consumption. Leisure as Disguise Through the Mercato, hyperreal Italy connects to the dream of excess consumption championed in Dubai. To wit, the city state’s main holiday is its annual shopping festival, during which millions of frenzied tourist consumers, credit cards in hand, descend on the Gulf State ready to shop, tax free, until they drop. While the Mercato’s architecture links Italy to notions of tradition and authenticity, it also deploys rhetoric to appropriate destination Italy’s identification as an always already leisure space. In short, the mall conflates the sweet life of Italy – la dolce vita – with the good life in Dubai. This conflation is most evident in the Mercato’s advertising materials. First, the mall’s slogan exhorts visitors to “Step into Mercato. The Good Life.” The text implies that by setting foot in the mall the tourist consumer will leave her quotidian life behind to begin a better one. Second, the Mercato’s printed brochures detail what this good life consists of, namely entertainment, shopping, and cuisine couched in an Italian environment: “Just walking distance from the sea, but away from the bustle of the city, Mercato, with its unique blend of Tuscan and Venetian architecture and design, offers only the best in entertainment, shopping, and cuisine, it’s a way of life.” The brochure connects the shopping mall to both a non-urban setting (near the sea, away from the city) as well as to Italy (Tuscany and Venice). By transitive principle, Italy too stands opposed to the city. And if the city is the locus of modernity, then the text ever so subtly situates Italy at its opposite pole, tradition. The Mercato’s website makes clear that the good life is very much a lifestyle centred on leisure but made possible by consumption. It describes the activities that comprise the good life: “Re-discover the pleasures of shopping at Mercato with its unique blend of Tuscan and Venetian architecture that will continue to tell the extraordinary tales of exceptional beauty and creativity of the Renaissance period for many years to come. Take your time browsing down charming cobbled streets, relax along a bright piazza, enjoy a romantic dinner and latest

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movie and experience the pleasure of knowing that you’ll find everything you came for. After all, Mercato is much more than just a mall, it’s The Good Life.”52 Illogically, the text connects the “pleasure of shopping” with the “exceptional beauty and creativity of the Renaissance” vis-à-vis the fusion of Tuscan and Venetian architecture. Here, to shop is to create. By evoking the Renaissance, the text implies that tourist consumers can recreate the same “extraordinary tales” and “exceptional beauty” when they shop at the Mercato. The shopper is an artist. The brochure also describes what kind of lifestyle, “the good life,” one would have if given over to consumption. And consumption opens a portal to this hyperreal Italy – this traditional, authentic, and always already leisure space of la dolce vita – allowing the shopping centre to transcend its physical confines. The text even says as much: “the Mercato is much more than a mall, it is The Good Life.” In sum, the Mercato shopping mall in Dubai is an Italian simulacrum with a singular purpose: excess consumption. It employs a mix of Tuscan and Venetian architecture to disguise itself in unspecified ideas of tradition and authenticity associated with a pre-industrial, nonglobalized order. In turn, the built environment’s evocation of Italy as destination metaphorically transports the tourist consumer back to a more authentic age and eases the guilt of consumption in this temple of commodities. These are temples in which leisure, too, masks the exploited labour that built them. The mall’s rhetoric of the good life appropriates destination Italy’s identification as an always already leisure space (“the sweet life”), and this allusion to, and illusion of, leisure also helps tourist consumers to ignore the gross violations of basic human rights occurring every day in Dubai.53 This is yet another operation of disavowal and obfuscation typical of imperial formations. Leisure becomes a disguise to justify access to excess and, broadly, to mask insidious forms of neoliberal economic power and social control at work. The ambitions and by-products of such conspicuous consumption extend beyond the Italianate facades of Dubai’s Mercato shopping centre and its megamall kin. They stretch far into the Arabian Desert where miles upon miles of American-style, single-family McMansions extend towards the horizon, outfitted with security gates, stuccoed walls, and green lawns diligently watered and fertilized to resist the extreme temperatures of the Persian Gulf. While the Mercato champions excess consumption as the optimal way to obtain the good life, the suburb aspires to be the good life incarnate.

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The Suburb as Simulacrum: Sorrento, California If Disneyland is the happiest place to visit on earth, and the Mercato is the happiest place to shop, then the suburb was designed to be the happiest place to live. Created for the Anglo-American middle class in the early-nineteenth century, the suburb has come to be understood as a bourgeois utopia. It was constructed as a space that was safe from the crowded, dirty, and unhealthy city – an idyll in the countryside where family and community could develop uninterruptedly but with easy access to a metropolis. As with Disney, the scholarship on suburbia is vast, and the debate as to what exactly constitutes a suburb presses on. Kenneth T. Jackson has proffered the most widely accepted working definition of suburbia: a low-density residential area inhabited by middle- and upper-class people who own their homes and commute to work some distance from them. He adds that suburbia is “both a planning type and a state of mind based on imagery and symbolism.”54 Of course, suburbia has evolved since the early-nineteenth century, transforming from the idyllic escapes of the Victorian era to the mass-produced tract homes of the post–Second World War years to the gated communities of fortress America in the late-twentieth century. The academic literature on suburbia has focused on the United States, for it is there that the suburb has experienced its most expansive developments and reached its most mature iterations.55 In many ways the history of suburbia is also the history of the modern United States in so far as the conquering of this “crabgrass frontier” created new (and often turbulent) economic and social relations between race, class, and gender that have yet to be resolved. Instead of building community, suburbs have become decentralized, segregated places with clear lines of inclusion and exclusion. While much has been written about the cultural history and ideological significance of suburbia, this section attends to the ways that destination Italy emerges as a model for a suburb in northern California called Sorrento at Dublin Ranch. True, Italian-inspired suburbs are not unusual and can be found all over the world – for instance, the Tuscany subdivision in Norman, Oklahoma, or the Venice-inspired Qanat quarter in Qatar. What is different about Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, however, is that it does not purport to be like Italy; it claims to be Italy. It is therefore both suburb and simulacrum and accordingly represents itself as “five quaint Italian villages, one great place to live.”

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Italy behind the Gates Forty miles east of San Francisco, Sorrento dwells among the rolling hills of uniform tract homes, strip malls, multiplex theatres, and warehouse stores that comprise the standardized landscape of American suburbia. It is only appropriate that this development is in California, which Jackson deems “more than anyplace else, [the] symbol of the postwar suburban culture … a new type of centerless city.”56 For Baudrillard, California is not merely centreless but also vacuous: “[It is] the world centre of the simulacrum and the inauthentic … an hysterical land; focus and meeting-place for the rootless, California is the land of non-history, of the non-event … California has invented nothing: it has taken everything from Europe and served it up again in a disfigured, meaningless form, with an added Disneyland glitter.”57 California is the birthplace of simulacra and simulation. The inauthentic gives it vitality and power. As such, California is always already destabilized and dislocated, owing its existence to the very absence of history, events, and signifying fixity. Rootless and barren, a desert of the real, California is thus figuratively based on a constitutive void. California and Italy, too, share strong affinities (for example, Mediter­ ranean climate, relaxed atmosphere, good cuisine, tourist crowds). It is therefore no surprise to find a suburb here that claims to be five quaint Italian villages. This Sorrento by way of California draws upon a void that is Californian and fills it with a sense of historicity borrowed from Europe in order to serve up Italy in a disfigured, meaningless, and suburban form. Approaching Sorrento by car, as one is forced to do with suburbia, fragments of destination Italy reveal themselves in turn: Siena, Verona, Vernazza, Levanto, Monterosso. These are all subdivisions en route to Sorrento, like a surreal, circuitous Grand Tour. These Italianate subdivisions, however, have little to do with the monikers that inspired them. In fact, they all look the same, even compared to the non-Italian developments nearby. They comprise detached single-family houses with Spanish-tile roofs, manicured lawns, and pink and ochre stucco, all arranged in neatly crowded plots. Some have gates, and others do not. All must be approached by car. Indeed, gates and cars are agents of control here. Only those who have cars will be allowed to enter these communities. By limiting access, suburbs exercise just one of their myriad forms of control.58

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Sorrento delineates its borders with high walls and wrought-iron signs. Its landscaped entry of olive trees, cypresses, and faux-marble statues – romanticized signifiers of Italianness – all mark a metaphorical arrival in Italy. The streets in Sorrento are named after Italian towns (for example, Palermo Way, Perugia Street) as are all the home models. Multicoloured placards that mimic Italian road signs point visitors towards subdivisions called Milano, Firenze, Amalfi, Trevi, and Siena. The houses themselves are nondescript luxuries (figures 6.8 and 6.9). At Sorrento, too, there is an unconscious revival of the southern question. It becomes the unspoken discourse that subtends the suburb’s development in so far as the differentiation between the home models mirrors the economic disparity between Italy’s north and south. For example, the least expensive homes – the Avellino, Arzano, and Benevento models – are located in the Amalfi subdivision, all of which are named after towns in the economically depressed region of Campa­ nia. These are condominiums instead of single-family houses. With higher density and less square footage, they are not exactly the suburban dream. The most expensive homes – the Como, Pavia, Brescia, Mantova, and Varese models – are found in the Milano subdivision, which is clearly associated with Lombardy’s industrial wealth. Ironi­ cally, when put into the context of the U.S. real estate market, all of these home models are astronomically expensive, with the condominiums in Campania starting at more than half a million dollars. Yet it is likely that the southern question is unconsciously activated here for the discursive idleness that it signifies, that is, for its dolce far niente, because leisure is the ostensible goal of living at Sorrento. The Sweet (Everyday) Life A space of leisure – the clubhouse and recreation centre – anchors the Sorrento suburban development. Indeed, Sorrento foregrounds leisure as its utmost cultural value and stages this conviction in all of its publication materials. For example, the Sorrento website urges visitors to: “take yourself back to a simpler time with Sorrento at Dublin Ranch – a picturesque Italian village in the heart of the East Bay. Sorrento homes offer an unprecedented level of luxury, while the community features every possible convenience: recreation centers with swimming pools, spas and fitness centers, a thriving retail main street and easy access to major highways and public transportation. It all adds up to the sweet life, or as they say in Italy, La dolce vita.”59 The text asserts that this

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6.8 (above) and 6.9 (left) The suburb as simulacrum, 2008. In northern California, Sorrento at Dublin Ranch bills itself as Italy, where residents live la dolce vita all year round. Sorrento is a dwelling that puts an end to travelling – no longer is Italy just a destination; it is now the tourist’s home itself. Photos by the author.

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suburb is not simply like Italy; it is an Italian village. It engages the rhetoric of la dolce vita to mark a life of leisure. To live at Sorrento, then, is to metaphorically live and consume as both a tourist and an Italian. The suburb’s other marketing materials further underscore this conflation. For example, a thirty-second commercial available for viewing on the same website begins with a montage of photographs, like snapshots from a vacation. This montage shows a young, handsome couple biking, walking arm in arm, looking at the subdivision’s houses, dining al fresco, and sitting by a fountain. Next, the photographs are displayed one by one (a camera shutter sounds after each, providing an audio marker of a touristic experience), and a voice-over offers a conversation between two women, one of whom is presumably shown in the photographs: woman 1: So this is what you guys did this summer. woman 2: Yep, that’s me and Tony biking in the hills. Here we are enjoying the architecture, having a romantic evening on the balcony, and drinking an espresso by the fountain. woman 1: Nice. Which part of Italy were you in? woman 2: We weren’t in Italy, we were just hanging around our neighborhood. narrator: Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, like being on an Italian vacation all year long.

To live in Sorrento is to be on vacation in perpetuity. Yet these statements signify misrecognition on several levels. First, one of the women mistakes Sorrento for Italy and must be corrected. Second, the commercial admits that the suburb is not Italy, but still insists and acts as if it is. This disavowal is immediately followed by a substitution, wherein the narrator obverts her admission that the suburb is not really Italy, with the touristic lifestyle enabled by Sorrento (“like being on an Italian vacation all year long”). Sorrento is not Italy, but rather it is destination Italy materialized in the built form of the suburb. In this hyperreal form, Italy, by dint of its touristic heritage, becomes interchangeable with vacation itself. While the Venetian casino-resort embodies an empty procession of monuments, Sorrento incarnates an existence predicated on leisure. It is Italy as destination, framed and packaged for consumption in everyday life. This suburb as simulacrum designs, through its built environment, what should comprise la dolce vita and urges its residents towards this lifestyle. Like the photograph spots at Tokyo DisneySea that instruct

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one how to gaze, Sorrento instructs one how to live. Yet this life of leisure is no longer linked to travel per se. Sorrento is a dwelling that effectively puts an end to travelling: no longer is Italy simply a destination; now it is the tourist’s home itself. Neighbourhood under Watch With this Sorrento in California the evolution of suburbia comes full circle. With its appropriation of destination Italy this subdivision represents a return to suburbia’s Italian origins. The first suburban developments outside London in the early-nineteenth century were noted for their similarity to the villae suburbanae (suburban villas) that once ringed ancient Rome. In terms of design, they were modelled on the Palladian villa, one of the most famous symbols of Italian Renaissance architecture. At one point the Thames River was so populated with Palladian-inspired edifices that a commentator nicknamed it “the Brenta” after the famed river of the Veneto region.60 In the twentieth century, suburban spaces were so urbanized that they became self-contained mini-cities with their own shopping malls, parks, and downtowns.61 Sorrento fashions itself as such; it is a mini-city that is also an idealized place to live. In this fashioning, the suburb amplifies the attachment between Italy as destination, and utopia, and particularly the Renaissance conceptions of the città ideale (ideal city), like those developed by the architect Filarete and his ideal city plan for Sforzinda.62 Like the ideal city, Sorrento the suburb is laid out with a central piazza that is occupied by the clubhouse and recreation centre. Its home models radiate from that centre in a rectilinear pattern but are all contained within a circular boundary, echoing once again the many Renaissance plans for utopian spaces. Yet these idealized spaces of leisure are tightly controlled and policed at Sorrento. Here the threat of discipline always looms as a security guard inspects licence plates and scrutinizes visitors, while endlessly circling the premises in his golf cart. His stare forces visitors to explain their presence. And while there is no physical gate per se, the security guard acts as gatekeeper, watching cars and houses while patrolling the grounds. His gaze is alert everywhere like a mobilized panopticon. At Sorrento one must always be counted and accounted for. To enter any of the model homes one must register names and vital statistics, which are then recorded and sent to a corporate office. Once this information has been entered into the register, the suburb’s hold on the visitor is not only assured but also made permanent, for one continues to receive

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promotional materials at email in-boxes and postal mailboxes long after the visit. These are the residues, and the structures, of its control. Similar to the Venetian, the suburb as simulacrum shows how leisure framed as la dolce vita masks the severe mechanisms of control that maintain and reify simulated boundaries. Many do not simply visit this hyperreal Italy – a metaphorical prison constantly patrolled by security guards – but inhabit it of their own volition. People aspire to live at Sorrento at great financial cost, and, unbeknown to them, it might bear an existential one as well. They submit willingly to this control precisely because it is couched in the rubric of Italy and leisure. Control is impressed upon such subjects by the globalized structures of neoliberalism. It is this order that demands, for instance, home ownership as a marker of financial and social distinction. However, as many have discovered since the worldwide economic downturn in 2008 and ensuing real estate crash, home ownership can become more incarceration than liberation. Put another way, Sorrento provides an example of the neoliberal order masking its operations through leisure and, specifically, the evacuation of emancipatory potentials for anyone but the most rarified social classes. It is no coincidence then that the simulated forms of hyperreal Italy are not only the most highly observed places in the world but also spaces of leisure par excellence – a casino-resort, a theme park, a shopping mall, a luxury suburb. These leisurely spaces delimit and disguise relations of power and their uneven application, or otherwise the constellations of decimation, displacement, and reclamation – imperial formations – that persist in the fiction of the post-colonial present. In these hyperreal spaces that appropriate (and therefore instantiate) destination Italy, imperial formations become seized up within, and transformed by, operations of simulation. In closing, a return to the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans is in order. With its arbitrary citations of Roman temples and Tuscan fountains, neon lights, and contrasting colours and materials, the piazza evacuates all the content from its forms. Instead, meaning is to be found in the void, and, for this, critics still hail the piazza as a quintessential example of postmodern architecture. By most accounts, however, the Piazza d’Italia fails as a place and has done so since the day it opened. Its dialectical juxtaposition of forms and facades does little to entice visitors and, consequently, little to generate a sense of community. It often stands empty, surrounded by other buildings in varying states of decline. Its gates, too, are often locked. It was in a state of such disrepair in 2004 that the City of New Orleans launched a number of ongoing

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renovations at the cost of well over a million dollars.63 Indeed, the Piazza d’Italia has acquired the dubious distinction of being known as the first postmodern ruin. Yet it is not a fake ruin, like those of the Venetian or Tokyo DisneySea, but a decaying structure ravaged by time and nature. In this sense, Piazza d’Italia is a copy that has evolved into something more like its original – a material instantiation of hyperreal Italy that is, in effect, the ruins of a simulacrum. Yet the debris, the residues, and the remains of simulation never do long lie fallow but are continually regenerated with intention; they even do so within the territorial boundaries of Italy, itself a palimpsest of ruins on a globalized home front.

7 Postmodern Passages: Souvenirs, Theme Parks, Outlet Malls, and the Body of the Simulated Nation

On 13 December 2009 former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was working the crowd at a political rally in Milan. A few feet away Massimo Tartaglia, a forty-two-year-old man with a supposed history of mental illness, moved closer to Berlusconi and in the blink of an eye hurled an object at the prime minister, striking him in the face. Chaos ensued. Cameras captured Berlusconi’s grimace at the moment of impact. Bodyguards frantically pushed him into an awaiting car. Looking dazed, Berlusconi sat there for a moment before getting out again. He stepped out onto the car’s running board and proudly displayed his bloody face for all to see. Turning slowly, Berlusconi made sure that every television camera recorded his fractured nose and broken teeth from every angle.1 In the meantime, police captured Tartaglia and recovered the object that he had thrown at Berlusconi – a resin miniature of the Milanese duomo. In effect, a tourist souvenir had brought down the prime minister of the Italian state. The incident of Berlusconi and the souvenir represents a poignant, if not violent, collision of two symbols representing the political state and destination Italy. True to its etymological roots (cf. Latin subvenire, “to recall; remember”), this particular souvenir will now always recall the metaphorical convergence of state and destination in the Italian popular imagination. In fact, the resin miniatures of the duomo sold out in less than twenty-four hours after the attack, purchased in irony by many Italians, and vendors near the duomo say that the souvenirs remain popular mementos today for this very reason. To that end, a souvenir’s symbolic value is deeply meaningful even though its monetary value is usually inconsequential. According to Susan Stewart, the souvenir sparks a narrative which, in its telling and retelling, brings the past into the present and reminds its possessor that,

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as a tourist, she has victoriously “appropriated, consumed, and thereby ‘tamed’ the cultural other.”2 A resin souvenir of the Milanese duomo, then, sparks a narrative that reminds one of the “taming” of Berlusconi during Tartaglia’s assault, and perhaps also the symbolic subordination of the Italian state to Italy as destination. Not only does it tame, but this particular souvenir also wounds. Here the souvenir’s usual mnemonic operations spill into the realm of the corporeal, opening up an edge or a margin of the body. By cutting open the metaphorical face of the Italian state (Berlusconi), the duomo souvenir creates an aperture through which new forms of embodied subjectivity and national belonging might emerge.3 One of these forms materializes as a simulated body: the bloodied and bandaged Berlusconi figurines that made their way into tourist shops shortly after the assault.4 Thus the body of the wounded state moves from the physical realm to that of the symbolic – miniaturized, objectified, and contained by the souvenir. It is a hyperreal Italy condensed to pocketsize dimensions. This chapter turns its attention to the ways that Italy as destination becomes mobilized, instantiated, and localized as simulacra within the borders of the contemporary Italian state. In particular, it explores the articulations of hyperreal Italy that emerge in the landscapes of excess consumption that cross-cut the geographies of touristic space. It specifically considers three simulative forms of Italy: (1) the souvenirs of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi that embody the Italian state; (2) the spatializations of the state at the Italia in miniatura (Italy in miniature) theme park; and (3) a fake Tuscan village reconstructed in Tuscany in the form of the Valdichiana Outlet Village shopping mall. Together these simulated Italies distinguish a domestic order of the hyperreal. The order exercises the logics of simulation to compensate for, and conceal, the insurmountable paradox of the modern Italian state. It is a hyperreal Italy that recourses to the touristic imaginary, which again has little to do with the inverted patriotism and cynical pessimism that many Italians feel towards the nation state. Its material expressions – predicated upon leisure, consumption, and mobility – represent copies of an original that is imagined and instantiated through touristic practice. In doing so, these forms reveal an Italian state that is ancillary to the signifying relations of destination Italy, that is, a state altogether absorbed within a semiotics of tourism. More troubling, however, are the ways in which this internally generated, hyperreal Italy encapsulates the ideological forces of consumer society, and as a result it becomes deeply imbricated in the stratifying

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inequities of globalization.5 Similar to the Mercato in Dubai, some domestic simulacra activate “tradition” and “authenticity” to alleviate the anxieties associated with conspicuous consumption. The Valdichiana Outlet Village, for instance, aligns itself with the architectural autochthony linked to piccole industrie – the small-scale patterns of production and consumption and the interpersonal relations they represent – which stand against the de-personalized, mass-produced, commodified social relations characteristic of the globalized economy. It is a simulated re-localization that seems to symbolically oppose, but is really part of, the accelerating processes of globalization that have set adrift massive flows of people, many of whom are displaced by environmental, economic, and political circumstances.6 The outlet mall seems to ignore these very real human consequences by masquerading as a space of slow consumption that appears to push back against the branded lifestyles of consumer society. Yet it is still a shopping mall: a nouveau arcade of globalization that remains an exemplary site of excess consumption, a seductive temple of commodities. Many of these domestic simulacra apply oppressive mechanisms of observation and disorientation – from surveillance cameras to aural overstimulation – to police their simulated boundaries and to actualize the never-ending traceability (for example, one’s data shadow) that follows (and obliquely monitors and controls) mobile subjects like tourists.7 Along with policing, these mechanisms amplify other relations of force – allocation, re-appropriation, deflection, exclusion, denial, deference, subjugation – that are at work within the politics of the present. Paul Virilio is even more specific about the ways in which such operations destabilize the nation state: “the containerization of the emporium is gearing up to replace the imperium of bygone days, when accumulation dominated acceleration. The capitalization of the territorial expanses of geopolitics in fact greatly favours the staying power of being-there for nation-states and their identity, whereas it is the being of the trajectory and that being’s traceability that are now gearing up to carry the day, to the detriment of all localization.”8 The Valdichiana Outlet Village marks a false localization; it masquerades as “local” when it is instead a container of the emporium that is currently replacing imperium. Put another way, the mall spatializes a constellation of imperial formations specific to Italy that materialize by way of the protracted substitution of imperium by emporium.9 In the context of hyperreal Italy, then, there occurs yet another shift in the relationship between the modern Italian state and destination Italy.

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Domestic simulacra destabilize the signifying distance between the two, and destination Italy’s identification as an idealized space of tourism effectively supplants the state’s constitutive paradox. As such, Italians – shopping at the Valdichiana Outlet Village or touring Italia in miniatura – unknowingly perpetuate imperial formations vis-à-vis simulation (Italians are hardly alone in this). In doing so, they solidify their own consumptive powers and social distinction while disavowing their participation in a globalized neoliberal order that tyrannizes and discriminates against most of the world’s population in the name of state and market. It is to these domestic forms of hyperreal Italy, and implicitly the naturalized values and structural inequities they both mask and perpetuate, that this chapter now turns its analytical focus. Souvenirs Past, Souvenirs Present Of all things, the souvenir is perhaps the most widespread material expression of everyday touristic practice. In the resin miniatures of the Milanese duomo that are made in China or the Venetian glass vases manufactured in the Czech Republic, souvenirs represent a powerful constellation of commodification, globalization, and tourism actualized in object form. They are objects that always speak in the language of the past, or precisely they are miniatures that recall one’s specific past as a tourist. The figurine of the Milanese duomo and the coloured-glass vase bought on Murano are all reminders of a vacation long over. According to Stewart, souvenirs generate narratives that “reach behind” to describe the context of their acquisition.10 They signify the absence of what they represent, the longing for the origin – or rather the moment of acquisition – whose loss is the necessary condition of that longing. Stewart also notes that the souvenir represents a transformation of exterior to interior: it reduces the monumental into the miniature, which then can be enveloped by the tourist’s body and appropriated within the privatized view of the individual subject.11 They are metonyms of vacation, both personalized and objectified. Souvenirs embody many forms.12 Observations of contemporary souvenir shops in Rome, for instance, reveal a quasi-baroque excess of material objects: T-shirts, snow globes, shot glasses, mugs, key chains, magnets, ashtrays, scarves, pens, lighters, and more. These touristic Wunderkammer enclose a semiotic wilderness within them, where the arbitrariness of the sign intensifies, and the signs, signifiers, and signified continually split and recombine (figure 7.1).13 For example, a mug

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7.1  A souvenir shop in Rome, a touristic Wunderkammer, announces its presence with commodity excess, 2010. Photo by the author.

displaying a picture of the Colosseum signifies, inter alia, ancient Rome as well as a tourist’s present-day vacation in Rome. The multiplication of signifiers and signified comes as no surprise in the postmodern era wherein “the relation between what was being said (the signified or ‘message’) and how it was being said (the signifier or ‘medium’) is continually breaking apart and re-attaching in new combinations.”14 The souvenir is thus a postmodern commodity par excellence. Yet there is one past that all souvenirs recall, no matter their location: that of destination Italy. Indeed, the souvenir’s origins lie within the Grand Tour itself and specifically with objects like Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famed etchings. Again, the one hundred and thirty-three Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome), originally made in the 1740s, achieved international renown as the most popular mementos of a voyage to Italy. In their innovative panoramas and veneration of antiquity Piranesi’s Vedute became the material embodiments of the aesthetic education that was the goal of the Grand Tour. They were proof that Grand Tourists had not only been to, but also learned from, Italy. Piranesi’s etchings were followed by other souvenir trends like the miniaturized capriccio

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paintings of Giovanni Paolo Pannini or Gaspar Van Wittel (Vanvitelli) and later the panoramic postcard.15 Souvenirs are indebted to the Vedute of the Grand Tour and likewise to the material culture of tourism that has developed coextensively around destination Italy. This Italian past infuses all forms of present-day souvenirs. The commodities sold in souvenir shops today are recognizable as everyday objects (for example, mugs, pens, golf balls) but are also marked with signs of foreignness (for example, the Colosseum, gladiators, the Trevi Fountain). As Nelson Graburn notes, the threat posed by the foreign – the Other – is made familiar through quotidian object forms and tamed through the twin operations of miniaturization and acquisition.16 When the threat is particularly acute, the souvenir becomes disciplined nowadays by one of the most familiar and oppressive forms of the globalized economy: the brand logo.17 For example, one of the most popular souvenirs currently sold across Italy is the “Ciao Bella” T-shirt (figure 7.2). Available in multiple colours, the shirt has the words Ciao Bella written across its front in such a way that they graphically replicate the Coca-Cola logo. The T-shirt functions as a sort of rebus with its written language being Italian and its visual language that of American-led globalization. More tellingly, the chosen brand logo embodies the excess consumption championed by globalization – and the so-called empire via “coca-colonization” – in which personal identities are formed primarily through the purchase and display of consumer brands.18 By conflating the written and visual languages of globalization, the T-shirt enacts a sort of hybrid identity produced by increasingly branded lives. The message of the T-shirt seems to be directed at females with its declarative phrase Ciao Bella (not Bello), which roughly translates as “Hey Beautiful.” This phrase could represent a stereotypical pickup line used by heterosexual Italian males and the associated culture of provarci (to hit on, to make a pass at). By transforming the pickup line into a globalized commodity like Coca-Cola, this souvenir T-shirt domesticates the threats of linguistic, gendered, and cultural difference. It re-inscribes what might be a potentially unpleasant experience for a (female) tourist to destination Italy by activating a brand logo to transform the threatening language of the pickup line into a sweet and palatable product. It is the quintessence of sugar coating. That it takes the form of a T-shirt is also significant, because in clothing and generally in fashion, Susan Buck-Morss notes, “the phantasmagoria of commodities presses closest to the skin.”19 Fashion co-opts its consumers into pursuing the ideals it prescribes (that is, thin bodies,

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7.2  A “Ciao Bella” souvenir T-shirt, 2011, combines the Italian language with the visual language of globalization, the brand logo. Photo by the author.

eternal youth).20 These ideals are continually renewed and updated, so much so that it becomes impossible to keep up. What happens when tourism and fashion overlap, as in the “Ciao Bella” T-shirt? What ideals get communicated? What impact does the souvenir have when imposed upon the body? Destination Italy serves as a critical locus where tourism and fashion converge. Tourists often make couture pilgrimages to the Via dei Condotti in Rome or the Montenapoleone district in Milan, or they

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make special excursions to the Armani, Gucci, and Prada stores of the Mall near Florence, a luxury outlet centre. Of tourism and fashion, too, the question of borders is knitted into both discourses. Designers push the boundaries of fashion. Tourists travel to new frontiers. In their most extreme forms, high fashion and tourism not only exist but also thrive on the edge. The borders of body and nation shape both of these discourses. Fashion depends on the body upon which to hang its clothes, and it depends on nations (specifically, poor, underdeveloped nations) in which to produce them. Nation states become the loci of distinct fashion identities, from haute couture to “Made in Italy.”21 And the seemingly innocuous forms of clothing as souvenir, like the “Ciao Bella” T-shirt, actually negotiate the most significant border of them all – life and death. Jon Goss argues that the souvenir interiorizes allegory, for it tells the (tourist’s) story of “temporal-spatial displacement but also embodies the trace of its lost origins and so promises the possibility of a restoration.”22 He investigates the dialectical trick of the souvenir: on the one hand, it signifies fleeting subjectivity, a distancing within space and time, and becomes “saturated with the pathos of death, decay and departure”; on the other hand, the souvenir deploys an economy of salvation that celebrates the resurrection of life and the recovery of meaning.23 The souvenir therefore becomes invested with the aura of the ever departed (of places, experiences, et cetera), and in a broader sense it enchants the material world of tourist consumption with spirits of the already departed. Put another way, the souvenir metaphorically brings death into the economy of tourism. Fashion, too, conjures up death. It directs desire away from the living body and onto the dead objects – clothes – that adorn it. Susan BuckMorss, citing Benjamin, gives a succinct overview of this operation: “Fashion is the ‘transcendence’ of [birth] as a new source of newness; it ‘transcends’ [death] by making the inorganic commodity itself the object of human desire. Fashion is the medium that ‘lures [sex] ever deeper into the inorganic world’ – the ‘realm of dead things.’ It is the ‘dialectical switching station between woman and commodity – desire and dead body.’”24 To wear clothing as souvenir, then, is to cover oneself with dead objects that transpose human desire from the living to the non-living, as well as to invest one’s living body with the aura of the ever departed. Clothing as souvenir metaphorically generates dead bodies clad in dead objects. The wearer of the “Ciao Bella” T-shirt might be seen, in the words of Benjamin, as a gaily decked-out corpse. Yet clothing as

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souvenir recalls only one specific death, that is, the death of the tourist at the end of a vacation. In one sense, these are garments of mourning. The T-shirt marks a longing for a touristic past that cannot be resurrected (nostalgia). To wit, clothing as souvenir tends to look out of place in everyday life. An aloha shirt’s bright colours or a baseball hat’s gaudy designs never look quite as good as they did when these souvenirs were purchased on vacation. Yet in another sense, clothing as souvenir is a funerary garment. Its possessor is the corpse of the tourist as subject who ceases to exist when the vacation comes to an end. The State as Souvenir: Berlusconi and Italia Garments, like the “Ciao Bella” T-shirt, bind the body to souvenir, yes, but they only do so externally. Other souvenirs incarnate bodies, such as the gladiator figurines sold in Roman souvenir shops that symbolize a past (ancient Rome) that is irrecoverable except in fantasy.25 To that end, these figurines are often fantastic creations like exaggerated cartoons or plastic caricatures. But what of souvenirs that incarnate bodies of a notso-distant past or bodies that are still alive? Precisely, what about souvenirs that materialize an intersection between body and political state, like the souvenirs of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi? Unlike Roman gladiators, Berlusconi still lives in the present, and a variety of souvenirs in his likeness have emerged during his political tenure in the last decade––from bobble-head dolls to “Bunga Bunga” T-shirts to figurines of a battered and bandaged Berlusconi shortly after the 2009 attack in Milan. Of the latter, one version smiles smugly, with arms outstretched and bandaged head dripping with blood. Another, sans bandage, holds a book under one arm and bleeds profusely from its nose and mouth. These souvenirs were not produced for tourists per se but were aimed, rather ironically, at Italians. They were bought up quickly and proved to be bestselling Christmas gifts in 2009.26 In scale and in pose these particular Berlusconi souvenirs look similar to the crèche figurines common to Italian nativity scenes (known as presepi), and it was not lost on many that the Berlusconi figure with arms outstretched resembled the figure of Jesus Christ. Of course, this was meant to be taken humorously, and perhaps these souvenirs might even assume a place in the long history of the politically satirical crèches that are traditionally produced in the artisanal workshops near San Gregorio Armeno in Naples. While they were not produced for mass tourists, like the Berlusconi bobble-head doll issued in 2011 was, these

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bloodied souvenirs served the same semiotic and mnemonic functions: they remind one of a past that cannot be recovered (Tartaglia’s attack) and metaphorically reduce the monumental into the miniature (the Italian state into Berlusconi form), which can then be appropriated and domesticated by its possessor. In the meantime the bloodied and bandaged Berlusconi figurines also recall the common literary trope of Italy personified as a wounded and battered woman, often awaiting her redeemer.27 From Dante’s Commedia (Purgatory VI) to Petrarch’s Canzoniere (RVF 53 and 128), and from Machiavelli’s The Prince (chapter XVI) to Leopardi’s Canti (“All’Italia”), this trope has structured the idea of Italy in the Italian literary imagination for centuries. These personified Italies tend to assume the form of women in venerated social positions (for example, bride, queen, mother, widow) who have suffered injuries at the hands of external oppressors or their own kin. Berlusconi, in the venerated position of prime minister, recalls this female Italy as he too was battered at the hands of a compatriot. By linking Berlusconi to the well-established literary trope of Italy personified as a battered woman, the souvenir metaphorically recovers unconscious fantasies. Here Berlusconi is put in the position of a female Italy. He becomes the battered madrepatria. In such ways, these souvenirs symbolically emasculate the former prime minister and, likely to his chagrin, render him impotent. The souvenirs of Berlusconi, like all souvenirs, therefore engage in operations of metonymical substitution.28 They are the parts that represent a whole. Yet these particular souvenirs, representing a convergence of souvenir, body, and nation state, engage in another operation: simulation. Jean Baudrillard argues that simulation “stems from the radical negation of the sign as value”; it is the process that exchanges signs, not for what is real but for each other in “an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”29 Again, operations of simulation construct simulacra or territories “generated by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”30 Berlusconi is, indeed, hyperreal. He seemingly has no origin or reality but that constructed by the media. It creates him both financially (through his aptly named company, Mediaset) and politically (through his control of television and print media). After all, he mass-mailed his propagandistic autobiography, Una storia italiana (An Italian story), to every Italian household as part of his election campaign in 2001.31 Berlusconi is therefore inseparable from mass media, inseparable from his mediated image; he is an always-already simulacrum of himself.

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This follows with Baudrillard’s assertion that any head of state is nothing but a simulacrum, and “only this gives him the power and the quality to govern.”32 The succession of political power occurs when one copy gets exchanged for another (the Bush legacy in the United States is an excellent example). No one, writes Baudrillard, would grant the least consent to political power, the least devotion to a real person, but they will do so to a simulated copy. He sums up, “It is to his double, he [the head of state] being always-already dead, to which allegiance is given.”33 Political power is thus based on simulation. In these souvenirs, Berlusconi’s simulated, miniaturized, and battered body expresses a wish image for an Italian politics, and an Italian state, that exists outside of, or perhaps anterior to, simulation. The wish image reveals itself, according to Benjamin, when the collective consciousness imagines how “to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production.”34 The wish image is utopian at heart, given to the revolutionary hope of recovering a classless society. BuckMorss describes it as “a momentary, fleeting experience of fulfillment dimly anticipatory of a reality that is ‘not-yet.’”35 This “not-yet” is expressed by archaic symbols that intermingle with new forms, or, in this case, a personified Italy, wounded and female, long present in the Italian literary imagination, which takes material form in the Berlusconi souvenir. The wish image visibly inscribes desired social ends onto commodities and, in doing so, imbues them with radical political meaning.36 Clearly, the desired social ends embodied by the Berlusconi souvenir are expressed by his wounded visage and his figurative vulnerability to bodily harm and political death. It imagines an end to the political state. In other words, the battered Berlusconi souvenir momentarily encapsulates that “fleeting experience of fulfillment … of a reality that is ‘not-yet’” and reveals, in a flash, the collective hope of an Italy restored to a state before simulated politics. Yet death, symbolic or otherwise, cannot annihilate simulacra or simulation. The latter has become an increasingly dense, irreversible order, now implicated in neoliberal articulations of state, market, and citizenship. Simulation has become virtually intractable against the “liberating explosions” of wish images or revolutionary masses.37 And Baudrillard contends that simulacra today develop no longer by way of the double and duplication but by way of miniaturization. In particular, he writes, the city emerges as the subject and object of this irreversible, simulative order; cities no longer reproduce themselves along the

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schema of production but rather miniaturize and simulate themselves as simulacra.38 State of Simulation: Italia in miniatura In 1970 the Italia in miniatura (Italy in miniature) theme park opened a few kilometres north of Rimini, the centre of Italian beach culture and middle-class domestic tourism on the Adriatic coast. It was founded by Ivo Rambaldi, a plumber and businessman from Ravenna, who, upon visiting a miniature park in Switzerland in the late 1960s, leveraged all of his belongings to build “a place where everybody, young or old, could personally get to know, enjoy, appreciate, and therefore delight in the enormous historic, artistic, and geographic heritage of Italy.”39 Rambaldi intended that his park be a place where one could visit more of Italy in a day than was possible in an entire lifetime. Today the park is almost quadruple the size of its initial version and receives half a million visitors a year, almost 90 per cent of them Italian.40 There are 273 miniatures on display, each representing a monument, a building, or an environment characteristic of a particular Italian city or region. There are copies of famous buildings, like the Milanese duomo and the leaning tower of Pisa, and examples of lesser-known structures, like the trulli of Puglia or the port of Genoa. The park is laid out in the shape of a boot, and each miniature is situated in its correct geographical position (figure 7.3). Italia in miniatura is a simulacrum of Italy as destination, that is, a spatialization of the domestic hyperreal. Its simulative operations are many. First, the park reduces the city to a singular sign through miniaturization (for example, Pisa becomes its leaning tower, and Milan is its duomo). Like the souvenir, the park brokers in metonymy, substituting monuments for entire cities and combining these cities to signify the Italian nation state as a whole. Second, Italia in miniatura displays these miniatures in relation to one another and establishes a field of signs to be experienced through the body.41 Third, the park generates narratives, and specifically narratives that advance the idea of a unified Italian state and sentiments of national belonging. Yet these narratives are forced and artificial, as if they were somehow conscious of narrating a fake, that is, a simulated state of Italy. The theme park, too, gives rise to variegated subjects born of such a simulated state. For one, distinct national subjects emerge from these spaces and, in particular, through their encounters with simulated

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7.3.  A panoramic view of the Italia in miniatura theme park in 2011. Photo by the author.

difference. The park minimizes difference among Italians (for example, class, race, gender, region) by establishing an absolute Other – its mascot, Emme, an extraterrestrial – who provides an impossible subjective counterpoint against which a collective of Italian subjects might emerge. These new subjects become metaphorical giants moving through a miniature landscape. As their bodies cross and re-cross simulated borders, they are able to see and know a space – destination Italy – that is otherwise impossible to know except from their perspective as giants. In a broader sense, these giants in a theme park constitute a simulated body public born of a simulated Italian state. Garibaldi’s New Thousand In the park the miniatures appear to be scattered about the landscape. There is neither a detailed map nor a guidebook explaining the min­ iatures or their layout. In fact, the way in which the miniatures are

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arranged is unclear until one begins to move through them. A life-size statue and a giant poster of the Risorgimento hero Giuseppe Garibaldi mark the entrance to the miniatures (figure 7.4). The redshirt-clad Garibaldi holds an Italian flag in his left hand and raises a sabre with his right, declaring, “Fatta l’Italia, da qui iniziamo a visitarla” (With Italy made, from here we begin to visit it). Clearly, he is on the Spedizione dei Mille (Expedition of the Thousand), a renowned military campaign in 1860 of one thousand volunteer soldiers that defeated superior Bourbon forces and caused the dissolution of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; it was also the event that constituted the founding narrative of Italian unification.42 The figure to Garibaldi’s left is obviously another soldier dressed in a redshirt and armed with a bayonet. Yet this soldier’s face is an empty hole, a void meant to be replaced and photographed with a tourist’s visage. In doing so, the contemporary tourist to Italia in miniatura becomes figuratively inserted into Italy’s nationmaking process by assuming a position beside Garibaldi and metaphorically becoming one of his redshirts. Garibaldi’s declarative phrase references another famous maxim of the Risorgimento: “Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani” (With Italy made, we must now make the Italians). While often incorrectly attributed to statesman Massimo D’Azeglio – archival evidence proves he never uttered the phrase in this form – of importance here are the articulations between the rhetoric of Italian nationalism and this do­ mestic simulacrum of Italy.43 Given the sentence structure, Garibaldi’s declaration equates a visit to the theme park (“da qui iniziamo a visitarla”) with the making of Italian national subjects (“bisogna fare gli italiani”). Thus, the tourist to Italia in miniatura at once makes Italy and is made into an Italian by means of touring this simulated, miniaturized Italy as destination. Narrating the Simulated Nation Visitors begin the tour of Italia in miniatura at the southern tip of the peninsula at Santa Maria di Leuca in Puglia. From there a clear path directs them up the Adriatic coast to the Dolomites, through the Alps, back down the Tyrrhenian coast, and then to Sicily and Sardinia. Signs and arrows keep visitors on the “correct” path, and chains are set up to deter people from cutting across the miniature landscape as they might wish. Each miniature is marked with an explanatory sign; however, these signs do not give exact locations, only regional abbreviations. For

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7.4  Visitors to the Italia in miniatura theme park unite the Italian nation state by metaphorically becoming part of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s redshirt brigade, 2011. Photo by the author.

example, the town hall of Arezzo simply says, “Palazzo comunale (AR).” In this sense the signs are intended for Italians who are already familiar with the language of regional geography. One has to know this linguistic code – that AR stands for Arezzo – or she would be unable to accurately pinpoint the miniature’s location.

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An audio guide also explains the location, history, and cultural significance of each miniature, and this, too, is only available in Italian. Rented for five euros and loaded with tracks designated for each miniature, this guide becomes the means through which the simulacrum is narrated. If the cultural boundaries of a nation emerge through narration, as Homi Bhabha has argued, what then of simulated boundaries and artificial narrations of the sort present in the audio guide at Italia in miniatura? Bhabha contends that the transgression of boundaries creates in-between spaces in which meanings of cultural and political authority can be negotiated. The ambivalent nation space, he writes, “becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture. The ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves.’”44 Interestingly, the Other is privileged in the acts of audio-guide narration at Italia in miniatura. For each miniature there is a dedicated narrative that lasts on average from one to four minutes, which is read by an Italian doppiatore (dubber) in the voice of a famous person or character. Professional dubbing has a long history in Italy, its origins traceable to the Fascist regime and its policies of linguistic autarky.45 Today professional Italian dubbers are esteemed components of the domestic film and television industries; they have autonomous professional associations, technical schools, and award ceremonies. The most famous dubbers are even household names. Non-Italian actors dubbed into Italian will have a designated Italian voice lent by a specific dubber; hence all the movies of Roberto De Niro, for example, are voiced by Stefano De Sando. In the audio-guide narrative at Italia in miniatura, famous actors – voiced by professional dubbers – read descriptions of the monuments. For instance, Scarlett Johanssen (voiced by Perla Liberatori) describes Arezzo’s town hall, and Robin Williams (voiced by Carlo Valli) gives details about Dante’s tomb in Ravenna. In addition to Hollywood celebrities, fictional characters also narrate this simulated Italy, including MacGyver (voiced by Saverio Moriones) who describes Christopher Columbus’s birthplace in Genoa, and Ned Flanders from the Simpsons (voiced by Francesco Prando) who tells of the cathedral at Melfi in Basilicata. These acts of narration draw attention to an always already artificial and tenuous construct, the modern Italian state. By narrating the nation state through artificial voices, the audio guide reinforces not only the artificiality of hyperreal Italy but also Italy as an imagined community. Furthermore, as Bhabha would suspect, the Other surfaces

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through the narrations and voices of foreign celebrities and fictional characters. All of the narrators are decidedly non-Italian, some not even human (for example, Scooby Doo), yet all are voiced by professional Italian dubbers whose names are briefly mentioned at the end of each track. Here it is not the Other that emerges forcefully within cultural discourse but rather the Italian, pushing back against the simulated narrations of a simulated state. Separate from the audio-guide narration, however, there is an Other of absolute difference that emerges within this hyperreal Italy. This is the park’s mascot, Emme, a “friendly and harmless” extraterrestrial described as “a rather strange, tall, round and green-coloured being, with big hands and feet and a large head.”46 Emme is everywhere, either in image or as a life-size character. His visage adorns myriad souvenirs. He is always smiling happily on sweatshirts and snow globes. On the one hand, Emme’s cartoonish appearance serves as a reminder that the theme park is trafficking among orders of fakery. On the other hand, Emme the alien embodies a figure of absolute difference against which Italian subjects can be imagined (even those generated in simulation). The park’s history does little to explain the alien’s origins except that “[he] decided to stop off at Italia in Miniatura in order to get to know the historic and architectural heritage of Italy, [and] he became so popular that we invited him to be our mascot … Being a little megalomaniac, he has ‘invaded’ our shops with his image and he adores getting himself photographed in the company of visitors.”47 On postcards, for instance, Emme’s image is often superimposed upon, and juxtaposed against, the simulated, miniaturized monuments of the theme park. In one card featuring the miniature duomo of Milan Emme skirts the cathedral on his moped. On another he serves up pizza near the tiny ruins of Neptune’s temple in Paestum. His presence lends an element of the ­bizarre to rather well-known monuments. They are made to be both familiar and strange at the same time. He cuts an impossible figure gallivanting about “real” Italian locations. Yet it is not just Emme’s presence that makes these monuments feel both familiar and strange, but also their simulation and miniaturization. This feeling is simply enhanced by the presence of a green-skinned, rollerblading, pizza-serving alien. Freud might have called this simultaneous feeling of familiarity and strangeness the uncanny, or unheimlich, which occurs when “repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.”48 Given the pessimistic understandings of the modern Italian state as belated, backwards, and lacking

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in civil society, the uncanniness of Emme juxtaposed against this miniature simulated Italy suggests that profound psychic discomfort still surrounds the idea of Italy as a unified political entity. Italia in miniatura, then, provides a space in which that discomfort can manifest itself. It is a space that opens up and destabilizes the paradox of the state, juxtaposing it against a fantasy of absolute difference or, better yet, an impossible object. Emme marks the ideological construction of Otherness here, and specifically he recalls the stereotype of colonial discourse by embodying an arrested, fixated form of representation.49 Homi Bhabha writes that the stereotype is dangerous because it assumes a totalized fixity of the image and thus essentializes difference, making it seem natural, preconditioned, and ahistorical. Emme’s absolute difference is rendered ahistorical and completely naturalized here; according to the park’s guidebook, Emme just decided to stop off one day at Italia in Miniatura and has since been its mascot, no questions asked.50 Put another way, Emme might be viewed as a colonized subject: he is childish, racialized, and always subordinate to themepark visitors.51 As an absolute Other, too, Emme is quite an amicable one, always smiling and accepting of his subjugation. Visitors reinforce their mastery over Emme through consumption, acquiring him on souvenirs and in photographs. In such ways Italians mimic the sentiments of colonizers at Italia in miniatura, gaining mastery not only over a simulated Italy but also over an Otherized subject, Emme. Returning to the uncanny, Freud also notes that this sentiment emerges when “we are not quite sure of our new set of beliefs [that is, a unified Italy], and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.”52 As the miniature tour emphasizes local geographies, it creates a deep tension between the Risorgimento ideal of a unified Italy and long-standing regional divisions. The visitor vacillates between these two realities, between unification and division, yet does not have to choose between them. Instead the vacillation and its associated discomfort get displaced onto a fictional, and accordingly fetishized, alien creature, Emme. He produces a friendly ambivalence that reifies the simulated social relations and the simulative unified Italy represented by the theme park. Giant Subjects, Public Bodies The discomfort is mitigated by the visitor’s own extraordinary status as a metaphorical giant moving through this miniature land. The gigantic opposes the miniature, and it can only be described vis-à-vis movement

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through landscape.53 Susan Stewart adds, “In contrast to the still and perfect universe of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical forces.”54 In the form of the giant, the body is exteriorized and made public and, in doing so, inhabits a transcendent space that “analogously mirrors the abstractions of institutions – either those of religion, the state, or as is increasingly the case, the abstractions of technology or corporate power.”55 In other words, the gigantic body is a body public, which incarnates, rather awkwardly, an ever-changing constellation of social, historical, and natural forces. For this reason the gigantic body must remain in motion; if it stops, so too do the networks of social relations that the giant embodies. The forces that shape the aforementioned abstractions of institutions – state, religion, corporations – would come to a halt, and present time and space would be deanimated into the still and perfect universe of the miniature. At Italia in miniatura a metaphorical collective of giants roams haphazardly through this miniaturized abstraction of destination Italy. They constitute a simulated body public born of a hyperreal state. Some veer off path, some get lost, and some disobey signs and climb onto the miniatures. In one respect these giants’ unpredictable movements perform the order and disorder of historical forces described by Stewart. Yet, in another view, their movements reveal a profound sense of corporeal disorientation, that is, of postmodern bodies that cannot locate themselves in time or space. The gigantic body public at Italia in miniatura thus represents a new embodiment of an Italian subject born from a world of simulacra. By taking on the form of the giant, these subjects attempt to contain the destabilization induced by simulation (as well as the paradox of the Italian state) by enveloping and dominating it with their bodies. The giant’s exaggerated body exposes the fakery of the simulated state. At Italia in miniatura the body serves as the measure of scale, and its juxtaposition against the monuments is exactly what reveals them to be fake. The postcards and photographs available at the park’s gift shops, for example, show visitors towering over the Florentine duomo or peering into Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele or touching the top of Siena’s Torre del Mangia (figure 7.5). An initial glance at the miniatures, particularly in a photograph, produces a moment of hesitation as to whether or not they are real. Here the giant’s body is used to test reality and, specifically, to assess the built reality of this hyperreal Italy. It is only with the giant’s body positioned next to, or among, the miniatures that they can be exposed as fake.

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7.5  Giants in a theme park. The giant’s body is used to test the material reality of this simulated Italy. Photo reproduced by permission from the Italia in miniatura press office.

What flash of historical truth is to be found in this juxtaposition of giant against miniature? What wish image might this constellation represent? In folklore the giant is typically a figure that must be felled to restore order to a particular network of social relations. From Greek mythology to contemporary fairy tales, giants, either as entire races or as individuals, are necessarily eliminated to reinstate or reorganize relational networks.56 Italia in miniatura – a hyperreal order exposed as fake by the giant’s body – is a space then for the possible felling of giants. Moving through the theme park, these metaphorical giants generally appear disoriented and often lost. They sometimes trip over chains and constantly attempt to reorient their bodies both verbally and physically. They must also remain in perpetual motion as there are no places to stop and sit among the miniatures. This consistent unsteadiness and disorientation reveals the vulnerability of giants and opens up a

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possibility for their overthrow. The potential fall of this giant body public can be seen as a wish image for the metaphorical death of a collective of Italian national subjects. It hopes for the fall of an artificial subject born of an artificial state – the daydream of an Italy and Italians returned to a pre-simulative, non-touristic order beyond the nation state. Globalization on the Simulated Home Front: Valdichiana Outlet Village In the current age of globalization, mobility and consumption determine taste and social distinction, which in turn shape and stratify the politics of identity. One’s access to physical and virtual mobilities is a marker of liberation, and indeed the freedom of movement has become both an ideology and a utopia of the early twenty-first century.57 Those who cannot move or who have no access to mobility networks (and the network capital they impart) are condemned to poverty and marginality, sometimes even death.58 One’s ability to purchase goods and services reifies the social differentiations activated by the “mobility complex” whereby consumption itself has become more important than traditional social networks in the construction of a sense of self.59 Identities now shift in accordance with buying power, and that power has become increasingly embodied as consumers remake the body through new clothes and plastic surgery. Consumption is now a citizen’s paramount civic duty, too, as seen with the consumer confidence index that measures the health of national economies, or, more poignantly, with the “America: Open for Business” signs that went up in store windows across the United States immediately after 11 September, implying that even terrorists could not stop Americans from shopping. For the better part of the twentieth century the locus of consumer culture was the shopping mall. The so-called malling of America took place in less than twenty years, from 1950 to 1970, with architect Victor Gruen inaugurating an idealized matrix for mall building that was “designed to minimize guesswork [and to] accurately predict the potential dollar-per-square-foot yield of any projected mall, thus virtually guaranteeing profitability to the mall’s developers.”60 The suburban shopping mall replaced the piazza and the street as the hub of public life, providing a sanitized urban space for consumers to enjoy, far away from the ugliness of the city.61 Consumers can and do spend hours strolling these nouveau arcades. The mall becomes the space that mediates between consumer and commodity. It is the space in which retail

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magic happens. It is also a paradoxical space that simultaneously stimulates and sedates its shoppers: on the one hand, its repetitive corridors and empty vistas sedate those who walk through them; and, on the other hand, its infinite displays of commodities stimulate the desire to buy. William Kowinski has called this paradox – and the disorientation, anxiety, and apathy it generates – the mal de mall.62 The shopping mall and its predecessors (for example, arcades, grand magasins) create this paradox by facilitating a shift from active to passive consumption. Shoppers no longer negotiate prices but instead window shop and accept the exchange value of commodities as given. This shift from active to passive acquisition was the moment that consumption became naturalized, that is, when consumerism as ideology assumed its place as the dominant moral and communicative order of the contemporary age.63 Slow Consumption and the Malling of Italy With the shopping mall, consumer culture moves into the orders of simulacra for it simulates a city, but one reconstituted in a clean and controlled form. Although Baudrillard and others have pointed out the ambiguous signifying practices of commodities, places like the mall are no longer fixed in terms of their sign values. Shopping centres have transformed into themed spaces by re-appropriating other environments and reconfiguring them as settings for consumption. For instance, Venice and Florence re-combine at Dubai’s Mercato shopping mall to form a locus of consumption, much in the same way that the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano is the model for an open-air shopping mall called the Borgata in Scottsdale, Arizona – just two examples of many.64 These spaces leave little question that the shopping mall, and consumer culture in general, participates in operations of simulation that contribute to the spatial production of the hyperreal. One example of this complex, consumer-driven Italian hyperreality is the Valdichiana Outlet Village, a shopping mall located near Arezzo in southern Tuscany (figure 7.6). This open-air mall is a self-described attempt to “recreate the ambiance of a real Tuscan village,” with ochrecoloured buildings, tile roofs, covered porticoes, and a central piazza: a simulacrum of Tuscany situated within Tuscany itself. The outlet village brings globalization to a simulated Italian home front by resurrecting a hyperreal Italy of the sort constructed in Las Vegas, Dubai, Tokyo, and California, within the bounds of national territory. Its generic and disorienting landscape, with spaces demarcated only by brand logos,

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7.6 (top) and 7.7 (bottom)  The Valdichiana Outlet Village is a simulacrum of Tuscany situated within Tuscany itself. Its passages disorient the body in time and space and are distinguished primarily by brand logos. Photos by the author, 2011.

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transforms Tuscany into both destination and commodity to be consumed by visitors. The Valdichiana Outlet Village is part of a boom in outlet malls, discount chains, and warehouse stores known as ipermercati (hypermarkets) spreading across Italy. According to Aldo Cazzullo, the first mall opened in Italy near Bologna in 1971, and there has since been an evolution of consumptive spaces.65 Places like the Valmontone Fashion District, an outlet mall in Lazio; or a Euronics superstore on the outskirts of Rome; or a Eurocity “Tutto a €1” (All for €1) discount store at the centre of Arezzo all instantiate profound shifts in Italian consumer culture. Gone are the intimate geographies and interpersonal relationships of the piccole industrie. They are now substituted with generic, anonymous spaces made exclusively for commodity display. In 2012 there were as many as twenty-eight outlet malls located throughout the country including Sicily and Sardinia.66 Not only has the mall replaced the piazza and the street as the hub of public life, but it is also displacing other entrenched institutions, like the church, in the Italian quotidian. In 2008, for instance, the first Catholic mass to be celebrated in a mall took place at the massive Roma Est shopping centre, where communion was even given in a multiplex movie theatre.67 The mall provides one-stop shopping for the body, and now apparently for the soul. At the Valdichiana Outlet Village the consumers are almost exclusively Italian.68 There are approximately 4.3 million annual visitors, most of them Italians from neighbouring regions like Lazio and Abruzzo.69 Here, Italians experience a simulated “glocality” but with an emphasis on the local rather than the global. The mall’s architecture emphasizes the autochthonous, the local, the Tuscan – dressing it up as “tradition” and “authenticity” in faux tile rooftops and potted olive trees – and, as such, the shopping centre attempts to render globalized consumer culture more palatable. The spatial vernacular of this mall recalls the historic, small-scale economic networks of Tuscan villages in order to idealize what might be called slow consumption. In built form the mall appears to symbolically resist consumer culture by emulating local and regional identities, to push back against globalization. Interestingly, the nation state is not present here, perhaps implying that it is no longer relevant in this globalized age. Instead, local and global forms are the primary expressions of these slow consumptive practices. In practice, however, this shopping centre is an exemplary site of conspicuous consumption. It is what Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk term an “evil paradise” that provides entrée into a “dreamworld of neoliberalism.”70 Other hyperreal Italian spaces, like the Mercato in

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Dubai or Tokyo DisneySea, pay no lip service to slow consumption; they champion consumer culture as the natural state of the global political economy. The Valdichiana Outlet Village instead embodies one of the fundamental paradoxes of Italian hyperreality: it appears to resist globalized consumerism in form, all the while embracing and advancing a greater consumer society. The outlet village is thus a space of tension that fluidly shifts between local and global and, accordingly, between forms of mall, simulacrum, and meta-arcade. This tension gives pause in such a way that it evokes what Benjamin would have called a monad, or a constellation where “thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions,” which in turn reveals a flash of historical truth.71 The outlet village becomes the space in which the paradoxes of both Italian hyperreality and the Italian state are let out: the simultaneous resistance and celebration of consumer culture – vis-à-vis local and global – which together excise and incorporate the state within the globalized networks of consumption and mobility. Glocal Forms of Control One must arrive at the Valdichiana Outlet Village by car, just as one does with suburbia. Set in an industrial zone off the A1 highway (the Autostrada del Sole), halfway between Rome and Florence, the mall is all but inaccessible via public transportation. Instead, with ample signage and parking, the outlet village welcomes the car. The automobile is so privileged here that the parking lots are actually bigger than the mall itself. Once they have parked their cars, the visitors walk towards the three archways that demarcate the mall entrance, passing under a giant sign that reads “Valdichiana Outlet Village,” which is flanked by Levi’s logo on one side and Nike’s on the other. At every turn one is overwhelmed by a plethora of brands. Since the opening of the mall in July 2005 the brand rather than the architectonic form has distinguished its spaces from one another. Some are world famous, like Nike or Levi’s, and others are lesser known, such as Camicissima (shirts) or Baldinini (shoes). All of the mall’s publicity materials – from maps to brochures – stress the quantity and quality of the brands represented here. One brochure boasts of “oltre 200 grandi marchi di abbigliamento e accessori … sempre con le migliori griffe internazionali” (more than 200 famous brands of apparel and accessories … always the best international labels). Another brochure emphasizes the

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name-brand fashion of the mall’s flagship stores: “130 negozi monomarca presentano articoli delle più note case di moda italiane ed estere a prezzi vantaggiosi, con riduzioni fino al 70% rispetto ai prezzi dei negozi tradizionali, tutto l’anno e 7 giorni su 7” (130 flagship stores offer name-brand fashion, Italian and foreign, at discount prices, with savings up to 70% with respect to traditional stores, all year long and seven days a week). That shoppers can acquire these brands at all hours of any day demonstrates that the outlet mall is always open for business. Contrary to the structured work hours of the piccole industrie in Tuscany – closed for lunch in the afternoon and all day on Sunday – the Valdichiana Outlet Village embraces the all-access, instantly gratifying, 24-hour consumer culture of late capitalism. Consumption never sleeps, and the outlet mall is only happy to oblige this insomnia. At first glance, too, the mall complex appears as a stuccoed assemblage of arches, porticoes, balconies, and passageways vaguely reminiscent of Vasari’s sixteenth-century loggia in nearby Arezzo. The buildings are painted in muted earth tones, with some even falsely aged by architectural interventions: a faux bricked-up window, for instance. A central piazza anchors the mall and is the prime structural feature through which it “recreates the ambiance of a real Tuscan village.” This publicity frames the mall as “un vero e proprio borgo dove passeggiare, divertirsi ed esaudire i propri desideri; un villaggio dove è bello ritornare” (a true and proper village, where [one] strolls, enjoys oneself, and satisfies one’s desires; a village to which it is nice to return).72 The central Piazza Maggiore has two levels: a lower level occupied by shops under a loggia, and an upper level with empty offices, planter boxes, and dead space. Unlike an actual piazza, the traditional centre of public life in Tuscany, this one sits empty, devoid of life. At some point a carousel was brought into the piazza as if to animate the space; however this too often remains unused. Despite its claims otherwise, this simulated piazza fails in both form and function, not unlike the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans. While the outlet mall fails to recreate the experience of a piazza, it succeeds in disorienting the body in space and time to offer an experience of the postmodern instead. Like the Westin Bonaventure or the Venetian casino-resort, the mall’s symmetrical layout and its repetitive architecture give the impression that one is walking in circles. To walk in either direction from Piazza Maggiore is to walk past the exact same landscape, but in opposing directions. One passes the same potted olive trees, alongside the same wooden benches, and under the same

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covered passageways constructed of fake stone (figure 7.7). The only things different are the names of each street marked by ceramic placards and the brand logos of each store. No clocks or chimes mark the time here, which allows for visitors to lose themselves completely in the experience of consumption.73 The outlet village spatially disorients and temporally isolates shoppers within its simulated world. The only resemblance that this homogeneous mallscape has to a “real Tuscan village” is that its central piazza helps to re-orient lost visitors. The potted olive trees, muted earth tones, and covered passageways all constitute touches of autochthonous architecture that symbolically evoke a sense of toscanità (Tuscanness). They are meant to recall a more traditional and authentic society – actually un vero e proprio borgo (a true and proper village) – in which economics were rooted in the intimate social relations of piccole industrie rather than the mobile networks of global capital. In addition to its architectural forms, the mall stages its association with piccole industrie by setting up, for example, displays of terracotta pottery and other products by local artisans at its main entrance. Visitors stop to admire this artisanal craftsmanship and its collection of vases, horse heads, and cherubim. Ironically, the terracotta display is juxtaposed against the Nike outlet store, its famed swoosh being one of the most recognizable symbols of globalization. These artisanal displays and architectural touches of the autochthonous can be seen as symbolically palliating whatever consumer anxieties might exist because of the excess consumption of late capitalism. Put differently, it wraps buyer’s remorse in an appealing space: it is a village, not a mall (just like the Porto Vecchio Village at the Mercato in Dubai). As such, the shopping centre appears to push back against the branded lifestyles of globals by spatializing the trope of toscanità in architectural form.74 This suggestive palliation signifies the paradox of Italian hyperreality experienced at the Valdichiana Outlet Village; despite the architectonic evocation of slow consumption, the mall, in actuality, celebrates just the opposite, consumptive excess. Buying Power The subjects interpellated at such a simulacrum are necessarily subjects of, and subjugated to, the structures of globalization. At the Valdichiana Outlet Village they are culturally Italian in so far as this is the language of commodity exchange; yet at the same time they are fluent in the economic and symbolic languages of late capitalism. These consuming

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Italians also suffer from the mal de mall, stimulated and sedated as they stroll through the outlet village. These are not the giants in a theme park as at Italia in miniatura but, rather, metaphorical zombies – slaves to consumption – wandering among branded landscapes. They are tourists at a globalized temple of commodities relocalized within and through a domestic hyperreal order. They are passive consumers whose gazes and behaviours are also tightly monitored and controlled by the mall environment itself. One cannot experience the paradox of Italian hyperreality – the contemporaneous instantiation of slow consumption and excess consumption – without first submitting to its mechanisms of control. The outlet village fervently polices its branded landscapes with a host of rules and regulations, security cameras, guards, and aural overstimulation. There is a proper way to experience the outlet mall, and any deviation is met with firm correction. For example, regulatory signage and surveillance technologies threaten visitors with such correction. At its entrance a large sign declares “no foto” and “no video” and is paired with a declaration that the mall is always under closed-circuit-television surveillance. Cameras are positioned at all angles, and one has the sense of always being watched. The gaze is alert everywhere. From a certain point, when one stands in front of the Fila store, a minimum of six security cameras are visible. In this respect the Valdichiana Outlet Village is hardly different from any other shopping centre, for, as Margaret Crawford notes, “[an] electronic Panopticon surveys every corner of the mall, making patrons aware of its omnipresence and theatricalizing routine security activities into a spectacle of reassurance and deterrence.”75 To amplify the threats made by signs and cameras, two security guards continually circle the outlet complex on motorized tricycles, making sure that consumers behave according to the proclaimed regulations. These security guards represent a mobilized and humanized panopticon that does not just gaze, but one that also follows, and therefore physically enacts, the accelerating traceability of subjects that accompanies global mobilization.76 The mall deploys sensory over-stimulation as another mechanism of control, and specifically auditory overload with its dedicated radio station. Like the ubiquitous security cameras, loudspeakers can be found on the corner of every building, which alternately blare mall-related advertisements and the occasional song. The patented jingle of Radio Valdichiana Outlet Village is the first and last thing visitors hear, given the dozens of loudspeakers booming in the parking lots. Historically

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this form of crowd control in modern Italy has its roots in Fascism. Mussolini’s voice, projected through loudspeakers, rebounded in public spaces at all hours of the day. The voice, and in this case the radio station, overwhelms the senses and erases any opportunities for quiet contemplation, much less rebellious behaviour.77 In general, disoriented, overwhelmed subjects, and the crowds they comprise, are easier to control. And the Valdichiana Outlet Village does just that – it exercises control – not only with its radio station but also with its disorienting architectonic forms and its endless assault of globalized brand names. Clearly, both the outlet mall and the miniature theme park demonstrate that forms of social control are not just institutionalized, as in the prison or the clinic, but also diffused and fragmented among the spaces of simulation.78 The formative enmeshment between simulation and control at both sites – again, one can only tour the miniatures or shop at the outlet village in a certain way – disavows and naturalizes the necessary subjugation to these very structures of dominance. In these simulacra too there is an implicit naturalization of consumption masked by a patina of leisure. As a result an implosion of the social occurs: first, by way of simulation as Baudrillard argues, and, second, by way of the faceless, mass-produced, disembodied anonymity rendered unto subjects through the mobility and consumption potentials writ into globalization.79 What is left, writes Baudrillard, is a destiny of inertia, for “the whole social comes to be imploded, and to be devoured in an uninterrupted process of simulation.”80 In hyperreal Italy the desert of the real is thus a desert of relationality naturalized twice over, a double articulation of simulated relations. As such, these domestic simulacra announce the final iteration of destination Italy in the contemporary. They also mark the present end point for the touristic imagining of Italy traced in the previous chapters. These iterations of destination Italy not only reveal flashes of truth about the historical formations of the modern Italian state but also inspire, if not mandate, the unsettling of such truth in the present. This too would result in the destabilization of the globalized structures of power coercively wrought upon us – structures that can only be dismantled through theoretical violence, the only resource left to us.81 With that, destination Italy can be engaged to interrogate and better yet to mobilize against globalization and its violent configurations that, in the interest of immediate profits for an increasingly select few, forcefully dispossess and oppress the majority of the world’s population.

Conclusion

The winter air is exceptionally clear in Las Vegas. It is a reminder that this electrified city of sin and speculation actually imposes itself upon the desert where living things still struggle to survive on the hardscrabble plains. Nature and artifice collide here. Clanging slot machines interrupt the silence of the bajada. Cars and freeways decussate the landscape, crucifying the sagebrush, fiddlenecks, and Joshua trees on planes of steel and concrete. The Luxor hotel shoots a beam of light upward into the stratosphere like some unholy hand rising from the earth to reclaim the night sky from the darkness. These are the absurdities of a city that by all rights of nature simply should not exist. I am in Las Vegas on this night, standing in front of an ice rink built atop a fake lagoon, and watching tourists figure skate in the desert. Neon-lit gondolas float by me with crooning gondoliers and mildly hypothermic couples. I see street performers dressed as jesters and courtesans posing with passersby. A giant phosphorescent Christmas tree rises up between the fake columns of Saint Mark and Saint Theodore to challenge the Campanile for dominance on the strip. This is all part of “Winter in Venice” at the Venetian Hotel and Casino. Since I was here last, the hotel and casino have more than doubled in size. The Palazzo expansion, which opened in 2008, added 7.5 million square feet to the already enormous complex. But there is really nothing that seems “Venetian” about the Palazzo. It looks and feels like a nondescript shopping mall of an upscale suburb. There is a waterfall under a glass atrium. A Barney’s department store. Escalators. Victoria’s Secret. The occasional shop with an Italian name (for example, Prosecco, La Fortuna). I take a coffee at Illy and dine at the latest outpost of celebrity chef Mario Batali’s Italian-inspired restaurant empire. Aside from

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my spaghetti all’aragosta, I found no traces of the intimate skein of canals and concessions that defines both the real Venice and the simulacrum next door. Instead, the Palazzo overwhelms with its high ceilings and wide corridors, a citadel of luxury suites, and a metastasizing battery of slot machines and blackjack tables. I could not find the exit and wandered the passageways unsure of floor or direction. It was a quintessentially postmodern experience, but one that was different from the feelings of disorientation and depthlessness that I had experienced at the Venetian nearby. At the Palazzo I felt as if I was lost in the sterile lobby of a generic shopping centre. At the Venetian, in contrast, I felt lost in fake Venice. It was still just as much a shopping centre, but one transformed with fake skies, plastic winged lions, and seat-belted gondolas into an uncanny, hyperreal agora. Yet, such obviously contrary places – the Palazzo and the Venetian – are packaged as one thing. What binds them together is a single and powerful touristic imaginary: destination Italy. Both hypostatize the touristic stereotypes about Italy and Italianness (for example, food, fashion, cars) and commodify them with great success. In another sense, the Palazzo projects destination Italy into a realm beyond the postmodern – it is hardly Italian in either form or content, yet it still appropriates the signifying power of destination Italy to make extraordinary profits. In 2013 the Las Vegas Sands Corporation (which owns and operates the Venetian and the Palazzo, and also the Venetian in Macao) posted net revenues of US$13.7 billion and was well on track to surpass that figure in 2014.1 As such, destination Italy continues to expand its global reach as a touristic imaginary, even as everything that might be considered Italian is reduced to mote. The previous chapters demonstrated that destination Italy readily lends itself to the postmodern. What gives such power to this imaginary are the ways it playfully brokers between the real and the fake. Writers like Buzzati and Calvino knew this. Filmmakers like Fellini and Sorrentino embrace this. It is the country’s grande bellezza. It too reflects the fundamentally postmodern disposition of the Italian nation state. The form of the state was made during the Risorgimento, but its contents have remained indeterminate and consistently figured through belatedness, backwardness, fragmentation, and lack. Indeed, the famous statement allegedly uttered by statesman Massimo D’Azeglio in 1866 captures this disconnect between form and content best: “Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli Italiani” (With Italy made, we must now make the Italians).2 The form of Italy was made, but it was without content,

Conclusion 215

Italians. Thus, the modern state of Italy dwells in paradox, unified by disunity; it metaphorically owes its existence (l’Italia fatta) to its inability to exist (l’Italia non fatta). It is an impossible state. Given this paradox, the representations of Italy as a nation state pivot on the presentation of the un-presentable, which by definition is a key feature of the postmodern.3 Interestingly, destination Italy’s postmodern disposition also depends on the perception of it being pre-modern, that is, a place fixed into the realm of the ruin and the picturesque, a locus of tradition and authenticity invented and staged for tourists. The destination welcomes this contradiction, and, in doing so, it appropriates both pre- and postmodern (and everything in between) in the name of tourism. For this reason, there are three Italies on the Las Vegas strip and only one version of Paris, New York, and Egypt. It explains why myriad American suburbs masquerade as Sorrento, Verona, and Monterosso, and few, if any, imitate Shanghai or Beijing, even though China currently rates third in the world tourism rankings.4 And it clarifies why Tokyo DisneySea, with its aesthetic of “Tuscan hill town meets Disney hyperreality,” is Japan’s most popular tourist attraction. That said, destination Italy also owes its purchase to the millions of Italian immigrants who brought italianità (Italianness) to the rest of the world in their movements outward from Italy in the late-nineteenth century, just as tourists were moving inward. Immigrant culture made Italian cuisine familiar as it did the sound of Italian dialects. Neighbour­ hoods like North Beach in San Francisco, Lygon Street in Melbourne, and Little Italy in New York City became enclaves of Italian culture; they were homes to restaurants and cafés, social groups, financial institutions, and special events. Yet the Italian immigrants who inhabited these neighbourhoods at the beginning of the twentieth century were discriminated against not only as being dirty and poor but also as being less than white.5 This is a far cry from the current stereotypes of Italians who “ooze style, enjoy the best food in the world and drive with enviable abandon.”6 The radical shift in the perception of Italians and Italian culture over the last century testifies to destination Italy’s power to resignify stereotypes and reify Italianness as an alluring commodity – the beautiful country. Tellingly, the “Little Italies” that were once slums in San Francisco, Melbourne, and New York have been successfully transformed into popular tourist destinations themselves. Complaints abound that little remains of any “real” Italian culture in these neighbourhoods and that they now exist solely for tourism. In such a way

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these little Italies are not unlike the Palazzo in Las Vegas in that they too are attractions that have appropriated the signifying power of destination Italy to extremely profitable ends. They are only further testament to the ubiquity – and dominance – of Italy as a touristic imaginary. And this, in the end, is the present state of destination Italy. This book has traced the development of destination Italy across texts, practices, and spaces to show how it actually exists as many things at the same time – a powerful touristic imaginary; a counterpart to the Italian state; an expression of the postmodern; an inspiration for historical materialism; a hyperreal order; and a repository of tradition and authenticity that figuratively opposes globalization. The national identity of Italy is inseparable from its identity as a tourist destination, and the history of modern mass tourism is inextricably bound to the politics of the modern Italian state. It stresses the fact that destination Italy is equally constituted by the real and the fake, and indeed more people encounter Italy at its copies like the Venetian than by actually visiting Italy. As such, simulation heavily mediates the ways that countless millions of people understand Italy today. This book has shown simulation to be crucial to the formation of destination Italy, and especially the ways in which this touristic imaginary obfuscates the uneasy inequities born of globalization. Its first section, “Texts,” explored the tourist guidebook and showed how this textual genre evolved in conjunction with Italy as destination. In many ways the history of guidebooks to Italy is also the history of the guidebook itself in Western Europe and North America (for example, pilgrimage manuals, Grand Tour guides, mass-produced vade mecums). Rhetorically, guidebooks articulated destination Italy as a space of leisure and aesthetics through the tropes of il dolce far niente (the sweet art of idleness) and la dolce vita (the sweet life), and the topos of il bel paese (the beautiful country). They framed Italy as a land of the senses and reified the emotional experiences of being a tourist in this vivid sensorium. The first section also called attention to the ways in which foreign travellers influenced the practices of Italians touring their own country. The Grand Tour naturalized Italy as the site of aesthetic education for an elite demographic composed mostly of wealthy, male, foreign travellers. To experience Italy’s ruins and art imparted great taste and social distinction upon them. Like the Grand Tour, Italian-language guidebooks of the twentieth century emphasized Italy’s natural and monumental beauty – it is il bel paese after all – as the ultimate goal of Italian touristic praxis. According to these texts, to know Italy is to know its beauty, and they encouraged Italians to become metaphorical

Conclusion 217

Grand Tourists in their own country. In such ways the tropes and topoi that signified destination Italy in both Italian- and English-language guidebooks shored up both internal and external imaginings of Italy, which were also realized, so to speak, in the historically specific practices of tourism. The second section, “Practices,” examined the salient moments in the development of destination Italy from Unification in 1861 to the present day, and always with an eye to historical formations of the political state. It situated the development of international and domestic tourism industries within the familiar trajectories of modern Italian history, like the Risorgimento, the rise of Fascism, and the post-war economic miracle. Altogether this second section showed how external and internal touristic practices constructed destination Italy, and brought to light a historical narrative about tourism that has remained subjacent to more recognized histories about the Italian state, but in fact has been equally influential. For instance, this section made the case that British tour operator Thomas Cook, who is considered by many scholars to be the founder of mass tourism, stabilized Italy as a prime destination for tourist masses in the decade following Unification. In particular, he inaugurated a set of routes and practices that consolidated destination Italy into a unified geography of leisure, and as a result created a cohesive imaginary that proved to be a powerful counterpoint to the divisiveness that characterized the Italian nation-making process. Fur­ thermore, the routes and practices successfully implemented by Cook became models for the Touring Club Italiano (TCI), founded in 1894, which made the first real strides to codify and institutionalize the practices of mass tourism among Italians. It was the club’s intention to foster a sense of national belonging through travel. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Fascist regime appropriated and refocused the TCI’s mission towards venerating and reinforcing the self-determined achievements of the Fascist state. More insidiously, the regime created a culture of consent linked to mass tourism, which co-opted subjects into the coercive and often violent inequities of Fascism – its control masked by a patina of leisure. This forceful constellation between tourism and Fascism foreshadowed the dynamic links that would later connect destination Italy to the nexus of simulation, consumption, and global­ ization that takes shape under the auspices of what has become the dominant ideology of the twenty-first century, neoliberalism. The book’s third section, “Spaces,” showed how destination Italy itself goes mobile, and in particular how it travels through simulation. In places as far-flung as Las Vegas, Dubai, California, and Rimini,

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casino-resorts, shopping malls, theme parks, and suburbs constitute a “fake” Italy that is more visited than is the real. On the one hand, these simulacra instantiate the postmodern disposition of the Italian state. On the other hand, they mark a quasi-utopian imaginary that counters the dissolution intrinsic to the postmodern condition through fixture in material form. These simulacra furthermore connect destination Italy to ideas of authenticity and tradition staged and invented for tourists, and, in doing so, offer the perception of a brief reprieve from the anxieties associated with rapid and unchecked globalization. Even as it is artificially reconstructed and re-territorialized as simulacra, destination Italy becomes a place in which all that is solid does not melt into air. The fake is more real than the real. For example, the Valdichiana Outlet Village – an outlet mall located in Tuscany that is simulacrum of a Tuscan village – accessorizes its piazza and passageways with artisanal products like terracotta pottery from local craftsmen. Burnt-orange amphorae and corpulent cherubim accentuate its brandscapes. Such touches of the autochthonous link Italy to an idea of slow consumption. They hearken back to the patterns of production and consumption rooted in interpersonal relations (that is, piccole industrie) that were historically characteristic of Italy’s political economy. At places like the Valdichiana Outlet Village, destination Italy emerges as a symbol of slow consumption that has been internalized by Italians and non-­ Italians alike. Put another way, Italian simulacra often masquerade at putting real social relations back into processes of mass production and consumption from which they have been all but evacuated by way of the operations of neoliberalism. In doing so, Italian simulacra like the Tuscan outlet mall dressed up in local arts and crafts figuratively palliate the manifold anxieties linked to globalization. While the fake Tuscan outlet village built in Tuscany is the final stop of this book, it is certainly not the final stop of destination Italy. This imaginary opens up new questions about the relationship between tourism, consumption, and neoliberalism, and the ways that they might come together in the hyperreal spaces between state and destination. If the political state does indeed use the figure of the free market to impose its power upon citizens, then might Italy present a unique case in which the state itself, constituted through a destination (and vice versa), engages an alternative set of stratifying forces (tourism) that has emerged from a different but related historical context?7 Is there not productive distance in the interstices between state and destination that might unsettle neoliberal articulations of state, market, and citizenship?

Conclusion 219

Is it not the very projection of the state into this interstitial hyperreality that enables its expansion beyond its very borders? Could this space be one where subjects repossess a certain freedom of agency seemingly long lost to the free market? And with that re-inscription, might this space hold possibilities for resistance to the global inequalities intrinsic to neoliberalism? These are questions that might orient future inquiries. One possibility for further study would be a consideration of the tensions between state and destination within other de-territorialized geographies of Italy, like the Italian colonies and the greater project of Italian imperialism. The colonies represent an Italy resurrected on foreign soil, but, unlike the contemporary simulacra of destination Italy, they were deliberately manipulated and naturalized as pure expressions, and thus extensions, of the political state. It might be argued that the expansionist impulse of hyperreal Italy mirrors the project of colonial empire. Or perhaps it is necessary to relocate the project of Italian imperialism within the sphere of the hyperreal. One example of such an inquiry might be the Fiera di Tripoli (Tripoli Trade Fair), a colonial exhibition staged in Tripoli from 1927 to 1939. At the fairgrounds thousands of Italian visitors strolled along broad, austere, palm-lined boulevards symbolic of Fascist modernization, while en route to visiting the individual pavilions of each Italian colony (for example, Eritrea, Libya, Rhodes and the Dodecanese, Somalia, Ethiopia, Albania).8 The Tripolitania pavilion, for instance, included a simulation of an Arab suq (market) and café, and for good measure it added natives – solemn-faced Bedouin put on display, huddled with camels in a dirt corral – to enhance its reality effect.9 In practice, Italian tourists observed this cleansed and enframed colonial order and then walked outside the fair’s boundaries to observe the “reality” of the colony with their own eyes. Of course, this was a reality already manipulated by Italian colonial planners – who, as Mia Fuller has shown, had already razed and reconstructed much of Tripoli’s city centre.10 For a tourist the trade fair and its site in the city of Tripoli represented a double enframing of colonial order. They were places of double sightseeing: first, with the artificial representation of colonial realities within the pavilions of the fair itself and, second, through the artifice of Tripoli’s colonial architecture. Italians who experienced these highly edited and sanitized environments came to believe and embody the benefits of colonialism (for example, modern buildings, agricultural produce, pacified natives), which reinforced the impression that many Italians had of themselves

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as good colonizers or brava gente (good people).11 This is just one of the  ways in which the hyperreal (manifested through the spaces between the trade fair and Tripoli’s city centre) not only mediated the de-­territorialization of Italy and its relocalization as colonial simulacra but also disavowed the dispossession and subjugation of local populations that were the sad preconditions for the successes of both colonialism and simulation. In this order the operations of de-territorialization, dispossession, and disavowal also speak to the presence of imperial simulation at work in the Italian colonial context. It is expressed, for example, in hyperreal spaces, like the Tripoli Trade Fair, or among hyperreal subjects, like the Eritrean soldiers called askari who were conscripted from Italy’s first colony to do the bloody grunt work of colonization in Libya. To explore the relationship between simulation and imperialism also provides a way to draw connections between Italy’s neglected colonial past and the politics of its present.12 It can help to situate empire – in all of its contentious iterations – within the globalized mobility systems that order our excessive, networked, and high-carbon societies in the early twenty-first century. Thus, we can draw parallels between the Tripoli Trade Fair and the destruction of local neighbourhoods to make way for the fairgrounds in 1927, and the destruction of Casilino 900, the nomad camp on the outskirts of Rome that was razed by government bulldozers in 2010. Mobility, of which tourism is one of its most significant expressions, thus emerges as the key force through which empire in all of its forms has been realized both in the past and in the present. Indeed, the freedom of movement has become the main stratifying factor of our time, and the disparities are only intensifying between those who move by choice and those who are moved by force.13 We have now arrived at a point where one’s “mobility potential” largely determines success in life. It controls the very possibilities for agency itself.14 Those who are immobilized by poverty, race, and class are the true human costs of mobility, and, by extension, their very lives are the consequences of the states and the systems that reify the global phenomenon of mobilitygenerated inequality. The very existence of such consequences demands another type of movement – an academic one – that has the courage to interrogate and challenge the structures that sanction imparity, with the hope that our research will bring about actions that can heal the systemic afflictions that lead to such grievous and profound disparities. For now, however, that will have to remain the subject of a future book.

Notes

Introduction 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Rome. January 4, 1787,” in Letters from Switzerland and Travels in Italy, trans. A.J.W. Morrison (New York: John D. Williams, 1882), 203. 2 Pamela Klaffke, Spree: A Cultural History of Shopping (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), 100–2. 3 UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), “International Tourism Grew by 4% in 2012,” http://media.unwto.org/en/press-release/2013-05-15/ international-tourism-receipts-grew-4-2012 (accessed 20 January 2014). 4 International tourism has grown virtually uninterrupted over the past six decades – increasing from 25 million arrivals in 1950 to 277 million in 1980 to 435 million in 1990 to 675 million in 2000; to almost 1 billion in 2011. Profits grew accordingly. Tourism has been relatively insulated from exogenous shocks, like the worldwide economic downturn of 2008–9, decreasing a mere 3.9 per cent and quickly returning to profitability to post a 6.6 per cent increase in arrivals in 2010. To note, these are just the statistics related to international tourism, which do not include the more profitable domestic tourism sectors or the informal, but especially pervasive, touristic practices that go unmeasured, like visiting friends and relatives. UNWTO, World Tourism Highlights (New York: UNWTO, 2011), 2; UNWTO, World Tourism Barometer 10 (March 2012), 1. 5 Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 20. 6 Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1. 7 UNWTO, World Tourism Highlights. 2013 Edition (New York: UNWTO, 2013), 6.

222  Notes to pages 8–9 8 World Bank, “International Tourism Receipts,” http://data.worldbank .org/indicator/ST.INT.RCPT.CD (accessed 20 January 2014); World Bank, “Gross Domestic Product,” http://search.worldbank.org/ data?qterm=gross%20domestic%20product&language=EN (accessed 17 April 2012). 9 In his seminal essay “L’Italiano,” Giulio Bollati describes the historical problem of Italian national character as inseparable from Italy’s everchanging political structures and the fact that its rich literary tradition foregrounds Italy as a predominantly cultural rather than a political civilization. According to Bollati, the privileging of culture over politics allows Italians to internalize pessimism and advance an inverted patriotism when it comes to national identity. Giulio Bollati, L’Italiano: Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione, rev. ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 34–123. See also John Dickie, “The Notion of Italy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, ed. Z.G. Baranski and Rebecca West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29; Silvana Patriarca, Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6–7. A representative sample of the scholarship on making Italy is available in the bibliography including Agnew (1997); Ascoli and von Henneberg (2001); Galli della Loggia (1996 and 1998); Ginsborg (2010); Graziano (2010); Patriarca and Riall (2012); Rusconi (1993); Schiavone (1998); and Stewart-Steinberg (2007). 10 Lonely Planet: Italy, ed. Damien Simonis, Duncan Garwood, Wendy Owen, and Miles Roddis, 6th ed. (Melbourne, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 2004), 41. 11 One scholarly work that materializes Italy’s paradoxical disposition in both content and method is Jeffrey Schnapp, Modernitalia, ed. Francesca Santovetti (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012). 12 Antonio Armano, “Saremo mai un paese normale?,” Il Fatto Quotidiano (2 December 2011) http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2011/12/02/ saremo-paese-normale/174827/ (accessed 29 April 2012); David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 386–99. 13 Emilio Gentile, Né stato né nazione: Italiani senza meta, rev. ed. (Bari and Rome: Laterza, 2011), 97. 14 Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State, 1980– 2001 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). 15 Madame de Staël, “Italian Customs and Character,” in Corinne, or Italy, trans. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 88–108. (First published 1807 by H. Nicolle.)

Notes to pages 9–12 223 16 Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani (Milan: BUR, 1998), 55–6. (First published 1906 by Le Monnier.) 17 Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, The Pinocchio Effect: On Making Italians, 1860–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 14. See also Ezio Raimondi, Letteratura e identità nazionale (Milan: Mondadori, 1998), 30–66. 18 The use of the word tourism throughout this book specifies mass tourism, that is, the phenomenon that arose in the mid-nineteenth century of travelling en masse across greater distances and at faster speeds than ever before in history. Mass tourism democratized travel and made the aesthetic education offered by Italy and the Grand Tour accessible to the burgeoning middle class of northern Europe. Comprehensive histories of mass tourism in Italy include Daniele Bardelli, L’Italia viaggia: Il Touring Club, la nazione e la modernità (1894–1927) (Rome: Bulzoni, 2004); Patrizia Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, vacanze di tutti: L’evoluzione del turismo europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001); Annunziata Berrino, Storia del turismo in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); Barbara Dawes, La rivoluzione turistica: Thomas Cook e il turismo inglese in Italia nel XIX secolo (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2003); Marxiano Melotti, Turismo archeologico: Dalle Piramidi alle veneri di plastica (Milan: Mondadori, 2008); and Stefano Pivato, Il Touring Club Italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006). 19 Gentile, Né stato né nazione, 86. 20 UNWTO, Tourism Highlights, 2013 edition, 2. 21 Rachel Donadio, “Chinese Remake the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label,” New York Times (12 September 2010), http://www.nytimes.com/2010/ 09/13/world/europe/13prato.html?pagewanted=all ­(accessed 26 January 2014); D. Medina Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected: Architecture, Spectacle, and Tourism in Fascist Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2005), 107–43; “Food Statistics: McDonald’s Restaurants by Country,” http://www.leanitup.com/what-the-worlds-food-consumption-looks-likeinfographic/ (accessed 7 August 2014). 22 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 41. 23 Ibid., 17–37. 24 Ibid., xix. 25 Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 155. 26 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). On architecture and modern Italian identities see the following works in the bibliography: Fuller (2007), Lasansky (2005), Lasansky and McLaren (2004), McLaren (2006), Pilat (2014), and von Henneberg (1996).

224  Notes to pages 12–13 27 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 28 See bibliography for representative scholarship on travel literature in Italy including Burdett (2007), Cachey (1996), Clerici (2008), Hester (2008), and Polezzi (2001). With regard to film, modern sightseeing practices can be arguably traced back to the origins of cinema itself. The popular genre of the travel film put the city on screen in the early years of cinema. These cityscapes were put into motion by the movements of the film camera, using circular pans, tracking motions, up-and-down tilt shots, et cetera. Giuliana Bruno elaborates: “The travel-film genre inscribed motion into the language of film, transporting the spectator into space and creating a multiform travel effect that resonated with the architectonics of the railroad-like movie theatre that housed it” (21). The film spectator, like the tourist, used her body and senses to experience this mobile, modern city on screen. If modernity is the domain of the visual, and tourism and cinema are two of its primary expressions, then it is possible that destination Italy might localize an antithesis to this scopic regime with its privileging of the senses. Giuliana Bruno, “Motion and Emotion: Film and the Urban Fabric,” in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 14–28. On tourism and cinema also see the following works in the bibliography: Ben-Ghiat (2001), Farías (2010), Gunning (1998), Larsen (2001), Lasansky (2005), Steimatsky (2008), and Wrigley (2008). 29 Judith Adler, “The Origins of Sightseeing,” in Travel Culture: Essays on What Makes Us Go, ed. Carol Traynor Williams (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998): 3–23; Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); József Böröcz, “Travel-Capitalism: The Structure of Europe and the Advent of the Tourist,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 4 (1991): 708–41; Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002); Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002); John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 2nd. ed. (London: Sage, 2002), and Consuming Places (London: Routledge, 1995). 30 Nelson Graburn, “Tourism: The Sacred Journey,” in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 21–36. 31 Robert C. Davis and Garry R. Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 3.

Notes to pages 14–17 225 32 Helen Gillman, “Italy,” in Lonely Planet: Mediterranean Europe, ed. Mark Armstrong, Adrienne Costanzo, Rob van Driesum, et al., 2nd ed. (Melbourne, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1995), 533. 33 For relevant scholarship on guidebooks see the bibliography, including Antelmi (2010); Baider, Burger, and Goutsos (2004); Bhattacharyya (1997); Brusa (1984); Di Mauro (1982); Gassan (2005); Giannitrapani (2010); Giannitrapani and Ragonese (2010); Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2004); Parsons (2007); Poncet (2010); Ragonese (2010); and Thurlow and Jaworski (2010). 34 Roland Barthes, “The ‘Blue Guide,’” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Levers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 76. On guidebooks, stereotypes, and Italy, see also Mariagrazia Margarito, “La bella Italia des guides touristiques: Quelques formes de stéréotypes,” in L’Italie en stéréotypes: Analyse de textes touristiques, ed. Mariagrazia Margarito (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 9–36. 35 Jameson, Postmodernism, 9. 36 Fredric Jameson, “The Existence of Italy,” in Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1990), 164. 37 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 117–19. 38 Ibid., 119. 39 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. According to Lyotard, “a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (79). This book implies the mutually constitutive sense of modern and postmodern as terms embedded within one another throughout its analysis of destination Italy. 40 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 163–73; see also Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 26–7. 41 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Neapel,” in Gesammelte Schriften: Kleine Prosa Baudelaire-Übertragungen Suhrkamp, ed. Tillman Rexroth, IV, pt. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 308; as translated in BuckMorss, Dialectics of Seeing, 27. 42 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 76; Jameson, Postmodernism, 12. 43 Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986), 39–48.

226  Notes to pages 17–22 44 Associated Press, “Venetian Macau Said to Draw 114,000 Visitors in First 24 Hours,” Las Vegas Review-Journal (6 September 2007). http://www.lvrj​ .com/business/9612252.html (accessed 20 April 2012). 45 Oriental Land Company Ltd. Annual Report, 2011 (Tokyo Disney Resort). http://www.olc.co.jp/en/ir/e-book/annual2011e/_SWF_Window.html (accessed 25 April 2012). 46 Giovanna Franci, Dreaming of Italy: Las Vegas and the Virtual Grand Tour (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2005); Heinrich Klotz, The History of Postmodern Architecture, trans. Radka Donnell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 130; Pauliina Raento and Steven Flusty, “Three Trips to Italy: Deconstructing the New Las Vegas,” in Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, ed. Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 97–124. 47 Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 202–3. 48 MacCannell, The Tourist, 91–107. 49 Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 43–4. 50 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (London and Indianapolis: British Film Institute and Indiana University Press, 1994), 7. 51 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 63–71. 52 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255. 53 In addition to foundational works by MacCannell and Urry, see also Irena Ateljevic, Annette Pritchard, and Nigel Morgan, eds., The Critical Turn in Tourism Studies: Innovative Research Methodologies (Oxford: Elsevier, 2007); Edward Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Erik Cohen, “Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1988), 371–86; Tom Selwyn, ed., The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth-Making in Tourism (New York: John Wiley, 1996); Valene Smith, ed., Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); John Tribe, ed., Philosophical Issues in Tourism (Bristol, UK: Channel View Publications, 2009); Ning Wang, “Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 26 (1999), 349–70. 54 Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 61–94; Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 16–19. 55 Dennis R. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 35–53.

Notes to pages 22–31 227 56 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Vintage, 1978), 93–4. 57 Ibid., 96. 58 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005). 59 The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been characterized by the ascension of neoliberalism as a globally dominant ideology. While its definition continues to be hotly debated by academics, neoliberalism generally involves market deregulation, state decentralization, and reduced political intervention in national economies. Free market and limited government set the stage for rapid globalization. See the bibliography for representative works from the vast body of scholarship on neoliberalism including Campbell and Pedersen (2001), Ferguson (2010), Harvey (2005), Hilgers (2012), Ong (2006), Peck (2010), Plant (2010), and Wacquant (2012). 1. Codes of Travel 1 Laura Mari, “Monetine nella Fontana di Trevi, è boom di incassi nel 2012,” La Repubblica, 23 July 2012. http://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/​ 2012/07/23/news/monetine_nella_fontana_di_trevi_boom_di_incassi_ nel_2012-39587758/ (accessed 3 February 2014). 2 E.M. Forster, A Room with a View, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2011), 18. 3 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 36. 4 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 142; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. 5 Italy for Dummies, eds. Bruce Murphy and Alessandra de Rosa, 4th ed. (New York: Wiley Publishing, 2007), 1. 6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 38–45. 7 Italy for Dummies, 4th ed., 1. 8 Ibid., 1. 9 Travel writing has a long and storied tradition in Italy that has already been treated extensively by scholarship elsewhere. Representative examples of this scholarship include the two volumes of Annali d’Italianistica (1996; 2003) dedicated to travel literature; Patrick Crowley, Noreen Humble, and Silvia Ross, eds., Mediterranean Travels: Writing Self and Other from the Ancient World to Contemporary Society (London: Legenda, 2011); Natalie Hester, “Geographies of Belonging: Italian Travel Writing and Italian Identity in the Age of Early Tourism,” Annali d’Italianistica

228  Notes to pages 31–4 21 (2003): 287–300, and her Literature and Identity in Italian Baroque Travel Writing (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008); Silvia Ross, “Home and Away: Tuscan Abodes and Italian Others in Contemporary Travel Writing,” Studies in Travel Writing 13, no. 1 (2009): 43–58. 10 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 55. 11 Nicholas T. Parsons, Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook (Thrupp Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2007), 3–23. 12 On the dating of Pausanias’s work, see Christian Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide to Ancient Greece (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 9–12. 13 Ewen Bowie, “Inspiration and Aspiration: Date, Genre, and Readership,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas’ Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21–32; Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide, 28. 14 J.G. Frazer, Pausanias’ Description of Greece, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1898), xxiv; Habicht, Pausanias’ Guide, 20; William Hutton, Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–29. 15 Aethici Cosmographia. Antonii Augusti Itinerarium Provinciarum (Basel [Basilea], Switzerland: Ex bibliotheca P. Pithoei, cum scholiis Iosiae Simleri, 1575). American Academy in Rome Library. 16 Pascal Arnaud, “L’Itinéraire d’Antonin: Un témoin de la littérature itinéraire du Bas-Empire,” Geographia Antiqua 2 (1993): 35. 17 Of sites in Athens, Pausanias writes in book 1 (39.3), “Such are, in my opinion, the most famous of the Athenian traditions [logoi] and sights [theôrêmata]: from the mass of materials, I have aimed from the outset at selecting the most notable.” See Frazer, Pausanias’ Description, 59; Domenico Musti, Pausania: Guida della Grecia, vol. 1 (Milan: Mondadori, 1982), 210–11. 18 Jas’ Elsner, “Structuring ‘Greece’: Pausanias’s Periegesis as Literary Construct,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, ed. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas’ Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20. 19 Ian Rutherford, “Tourism and the Sacred: Pausanias and the Traditions of Greek Pilgrimage,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, eds. Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas’ Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40–52. 20 Ibid., 52 and 43. 21 Nelson Graburn, “Tourism: The Sacred Journey,” in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene Smith (Philadelphia: University

Notes to pages 34–6 229

22

23

24

25 26

27

28

29 30 31 32

of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 21–36; and “Secular Ritual: A General Theory of Tourism,” in Hosts and Guests Revisited: Tourism Issues of the 21st Century, ed. Valene Smith and Maryann Brent (New York: Cognizant Communications, 2001), 42–50. Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, vols. 1–8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892–9); Philip Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 55–151. Uta-Renate Blumenthal, “Papacy,” in Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Chris Kleinhenz, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2004), 846–50; Stephanie Malia Hom, “Consuming the View: Tourism, Rome, and the Topos of the Eternal City,” Special Issue on Capital City: Rome, 1870–2010, Annali d’Italianistica 28 (2010): 91–116; Andreas Rehberg, “Rome,” in Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, 974–88. Debra Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1998), 41–3; Parsons, Worth the Detour, 45–82. Nine Miedema, “Rome: Guidebooks,” in Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Chris Kleinhenz, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2004), 988–9. Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 114. Written in Latin, the 104-page manuscript dates from the late-eighth or early-ninth century and is named for the Swiss monastery in which it was discovered in 1683. The author is unknown but was likely a Carolingian pilgrim with a great interest in Roman antiquity. This writer was clearly educated, given the detailed descriptions of imperial topography and the correct reproductions of Greek and Latin epitaphs. Two detailed bibliographies of guidebooks to Rome between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries are Sergio Rossetti, Rome: A Bibliography from the Invention of Printing through 1899: The Guide Books (Florence: Olschki, 2000), and Ludwig Schudt, Le Guide di Roma: Materialien zu einer Geschichte der römischen Topographie (Vienna: Dr Benno Filser Verlag, 1930). Amy Marshall, Mirabilia Urbis Romae: Five Centuries of Guidebooks and Views (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 2002); Parsons, Worth the Detour, 83–106. Miedema, “Rome: Guidebooks,” 988–9. The Marvels of Rome: Mirabilia Urbis Romae, ed. and trans. Francis Morgan Nichols (New York: Italica Press, 1986), 3–11. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 43–8. Robert Brentano, Rome before Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth Century Rome (London: Basic Books, 1974), 79–80.

230  Notes to pages 36–9 33 Miedema, “Rome: Guidebooks,” 988. 34 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 94. 35 Ibid., 95; Nine Miedema, “Mirabilia Urbis Romae,” in Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Chris Kleinhenz, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2004), 722–3. 36 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 119. 37 The ars apodemica was alternatively known as the prudentia peregrinandi. Uli Kutter, “Der Reisende ist dem Philosophen, was der Arzt dem Apotheker: Über Apodemiken und Reisehandbücher,” in Reisekultur: Von der Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus, ed. Hermann Bausinger, Klaus Beyrer, and Gottfried Korff (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999), 38–47; Parsons, Worth the Detour, 112–15; Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550–1800 (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 70–94. 38 Stagl, A History of Curiosity, 57–60. 39 Ibid., 109. 40 Giles Barber, “The English-Language Guide Book to Europe up to 1870,” in Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers, and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1999), 95. 41 Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion: Richard Lassels and “The Voyage of Italy” in the Seventeenth Century (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985), 11–13. 42 Ibid., 120. 43 Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, or a Compleat Journey through Italy in Two Parts (London: John Starkey, 1670). 44 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 151. 45 For an extensive list of guidebooks to Italy published before 1800 see Justin Stagl, Klaus Orda, and Christel Kämpfer, Apodemiken: Eine rässonierte Bibliographie der reisetheoretischen Literatur des 16. 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn, Germany: Verlag Ferdinand Schönigh, 1983); Pietro Villardi and Giuseppe Villardi, Itinerario Italiano, ossia descrizione dei viaggi per le strade più frequentate alle prinipali città d’Italia (Milan: Stamperia di Giovanni Pirotta, 1812), viii. U.S. Library of Congress, Rare Books Room. 46 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), 3–4. 47 Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour, vol. 3 (London: S. Birt, D. Browne, et al, 1749), 61–2. 48 Ibid., 63 and 109–10. 49 J.J. Volkmann, Historisch-kritische Nachrichten von Italien, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Caspar Fritsch, 1777). 50 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin Classics, 1962), 107, 172, and 434.

Notes to pages 40–5 231 51 Volkmann, Historisch-kritische Nachrichten, xxx (trans. Parsons, Worth the Detour, 158). 52 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 110. 53 Sarah Benson, “Reproduction, Fragmentation, and Collection: Rome and the Origin of Souvenirs,” in Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place, ed. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 16–17. 54 Ibid., 29–33. 55 Mariana Starke, Letters from Italy, 1st ed. (London: R. Phillips, 1800); and her Information and Directions for Travellers to the Continent, 5th ed. (London: John Murray, 1824), 71. 56 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 172. 57 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa … A New Edition (London: T. Caddell, J. Murray, and R. Baldwin, 1789); Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (London: A Strahan and T. Caddell, 1789). 58 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 172. 59 Ibid., 209–11. 60 James Buzard, “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the “Europe” of Nineteenth-Century Tourists,” PMLA 108, no. 1 (Jan. 1993): 31. 61 A.A. Hopkins, “Blue Guides versus Baedeker,” Geographical Review 11, no. 1 (Jan. 1921): 152–153; see also James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 65–79; Richard Mullen and James Munson, “The Smell of the Continent”: The British Discover Europe, 1814–1914 (London: Macmillan, 2009), 106–25. 62 Karl Baedeker, Handbuch für Reisende: Unter-Italien und Sizilien, 30th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1902); Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers: Southern Italy and Sicily, 14th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1903). 63 Parsons, Worth the Detour, 183. 64 Buzard, The Beaten Track, 166. 65 Murray, Handbook, 1st ed., iii–iv. 66 Barthes, “The ‘Blue Guide,’” 75. 67 Alex W. Hinrichsen, “Baedeker’s Travel Guides, 1832–1990,” unpublished essay, 2008, http://www.bdkr.com/index.php (downloaded 21 April 2011), 30 and 36–8. 68 Karl Baedeker, Italy, from the Alps to Naples, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker Publisher, 1928), v. 69 Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 28.

232  Notes to pages 45–50 70 Rudy Koshar, “‘What Ought to Be Seen’: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identities in Modern Germany and Europe.” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 3 (July 1998), 331; Edward Mendelson, “Baedeker’s Universe,” Yale Review 74, no. 3 (April 1985): 386–403; Parsons, Worth the Detour, 204. 71 D.G.H., Review of “Guide-books. MacMillan’s Guides: Western Mediterranean, Eastern Mediterranean, Palestine and Egypt, Italy,” The Geographical Journal 19, no. 3 (March 1902): 367. 72 Karl Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Central Italy and Rome, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1869), xiv. 73 Ibid. 74 Maxine Feifer, Going Places: The Ways of the Tourist from Imperial Rome to the Present Day (London: Macmillan, 1986), 170–1; Jan Palmowski, “Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 115–16. 75 Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 52–3. 76 “Baedeker,” in Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com (accessed 7 August 2014). 77 Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers. Central Italy and Rome, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1869), xiii and v. 78 Lonely Planet: Italy, 6th ed., ed. Damien Simonis et al. (Melbourne, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 2004), 41. 79 Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), 118. (First published 1970 by Harper & Row.) 2. Italian Montage 1 Italy for Dummies, ed. Brian Murphy and Alessandra de Rosa, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley Publishing, 2003), 7. 2 Italy for Dummies, ed. Brian Murphy and Alessandra de Rosa, 4th ed. (New York: Wiley Publishing, 2007), 1. 3 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 56. See also Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century ‘Exposé of 1935,’” in The Arcades Project, 4; Allen Pred, Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present (London: Routledge, 1995), 23. 4 MacCannell, The Tourist, 41. 5 Given the spatial constraints of this chapter, analysis is limited to Italianand English-language guidebooks, for these two languages have the

Notes to pages 50–1 233 longest publication history of Italy guidebooks. To note, other languages, particularly French and German, also have distinct guidebook traditions, like that of Michelin and Baedeker. The scholarship on touristic representations of Italy in non-Italian guidebooks is somewhat scarce; however, there are a few exceptions, including Sergio Bova, “Histoire récente de l’Italie à travers trois guides de tourisme français,” in L’Italie en stéréotypes: Analyse de textes touristiques, ed. Mariagrazia Margarito (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 65–70; Carlo Brusa, “Dal Baedeker alle guide moderne,” in 90 anni di turismo: 1894–1984 (Milano: Touring Club Italiano, 1984) 50–5; Leonardo Di Mauro, “L’Italia e le guide turistiche dall’Unità ad oggi,” in Storia d’Italia, ed. Cesare De Seta, vol. 5, Il paesaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 369–428; Alice Giannitrapani, Viaggiare: Istruzioni per l’uso. Semiotica delle guide turistiche (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2010), 15–28; Koshar, “What Ought to Be Seen.” 6 Fodor’s Italy, ed. Matthew Lombardi (New York: Fodor’s Travel Publications, 2002), 17. 7 Italy: The Rough Guide to Italy, ed. Ros Belford et al, 8th ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2007), 1070. 8 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012), xvii, and Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and across Cultures (London: Routledge, 1993), 7. See also Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and French Social Imagination, trans. M. Kohcan, R. Porter, and C. Prendergast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986) and his Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2003); David Howes, ed., Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Paul Stoller, The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 9 Jill Steward and Alexander Cowan, introduction to The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500, ed. Alexander Cohen and Jill Steward (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 1–22. 10 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ma era l’Italia nuda e formicolante” [But It Was A Naked and Swarming Italy],” Pasolini: Roman Poems, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 102–5. 11 Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 60–7 and 78–82.

234  Notes to pages 51–4 12 James Howell, Instructions for Forreine Travell (Edinburgh: Muir & Paterson Printers, 1642), 41–2. 13 Roland Barthes, “The ‘Blue Guide,’” 76. 14 C. Nadia Seremetakis, “The Memory of the Senses, Part One: Marks of the Transitory,” in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 7. On the sensory turn in tourism studies see David Crouch, “Flirting with Space: Tourism Geographies as Sensuous/ Expressive Practice,” in Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes, ed. Carolyn Cartier and Alan Lew (London: Routledge, 2005), 28–9; Tim Edensor, “Sensing Tourist Spaces,” in Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, ed. Claudio Minca and Tim Oakes (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 23–45; Anthony Elliott and John Urry, Mobile Lives (London: Routledge, 2010), 16–17; John Urry, “Sensing the City,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 71–86. 15 Said, Orientalism, 93–6. 16 Barthes, “The ‘Blue Guide,’” 75. 17 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 1994), 100–40; Judith Butler, “‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All’: Althusser’s Subjection,” in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106–31. 18 Dennison Nash, “Tourism as a Form of Imperialism,” in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 37–52; Stephanie Malia Hom, “Empires of Tourism: Travel and Rhetoric in Italian Colonial Libya and Albania, 1911–1943,” Journal of Tourism History 43, no. 2 (2012): 281–300. 19 Representative examples of the scholarship on Italy’s southern question include John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999); Antonio Gramsci, Alcuni temi della quistione meridionale, rev. ed. (Rome: Editore Riuniti, 1991); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 20 Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, ed. Tullio De Mauro (Turin: UTET, 2000), 718. 21 Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, vol. 4 (Turin: UTET, 1968), 681.

Notes to pages 54–60 235 22 Massimo D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 55. 23 Angelo Mazzoleni, Il popolo italiano (Milan: Vallardi, 1873), 213. 24 Ibid., 214. Of the German “Zschokke,” Mazzoleni likely referred to Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848), a German civil servant deployed to Switzerland in the early-nineteenth century who successfully reorganized the Italian-speaking cantons and became known throughout Europe for his various publications on politics and religion. J.J. Bäbler, “Johannes Heinrich Zschokke,” in Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, vol. 45 (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1900), 449–65. http://www.deutsche-biographie​ .de/sfz14873.html (accessed 23 June 2011). 25 Pasquale Villari, Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia, ed. Luca Chiti (Turin: Loescher Editore, 1971), 119–20. 26 Dickie, Darkest Italy, 59–60. See also Rhiannon Welch, “Razza e (ri)produttività. Per una lettura biopolitica della razza nell’Italia postunitaria e contemporanea,” in L’Italia postcoloniale, ed. Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo (Florence: Le Monnier, 2014), 79–92. 27 Fodor’s Italy, ed. Matthew Lombardi (2002), 3. 28 Stephanie Hom Cary, “The Tourist Moment,” Annals of Tourism Research 31, no. 1 (2004): 61–77; MacCannell, The Tourist, 96–107. 29 UpClose Italy (New York: Fodor’s Travel Publications, 2000), x. 30 Rick Steves’ Italy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Avalon Travel, Perseus Books, 2001), 31. 31 Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, vol. 21 (Turin: UTET, 2002), 930. 32 Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, and Tullio Pinelli, La dolce vita, published screenplay (Milan: Garzanti, 1981), 52. 33 Stephen Gundle, “Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy,” in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 353. 34 Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2001), 229–34; Gian Piero Brunetta, Storia del cinema italiano. Dal miracolo economico agli anni novanta, vol. 4 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1998), 327–9; Fernaldo Di Giammatteo, Lo sguardo inquieto: Storia del cinema italiano (1940–1990) (Scandicci, Italy: La Nuova Italia Editore, 1994), 251–64; Andrea Muniz, Viaggio al termine dell’Italia. Fellini politico (Soveria Mannelli, Italy: Rubbettino, 2012). 35 Gundle, “Hollywood Glamour,” 353–4. 36 Frommer’s Italy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 16. 37 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 55.

236  Notes to pages 61–4 38 Italy: A Travel Survival Kit, ed. Helen Gillman and John Gillman, 1st ed. (Hawthorne, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1993), 9. 39 Bourdieu, Distinction, 53–65. 40 Italy for Dummies, 1st. ed., 1. 41 Mariagrazia Margarito, “La bella Italia des guides touristiques: Quelques formes de stéréotypes,” in L’Italie en stéréotypes: Analyse de textes touristiques, ed. Mariagrazia Margarito (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 9–36. 42 “Bel paese,” Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, vol. 2 (Turin: UTET, 1967), 157. 43 Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia: Inferno, trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 354–5. 44 Dante refers to the langue d’oc (Spain), langue d’oïl (France), and langue de sì (Italy) in De vulgari eloquentia, his treatise on the Italian vernacular (De vulg. eloqu. I, viii, 6). Dante Alighieri, Opere minori: De vulgari eloquentia, vol. 2 (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1979), 68–9. 45 Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), ed. Marco Santagata (Milan: Mondadori, 2001), 311–12. Translation cited from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 138. 46 Petrarca, Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), 313. 47 Translation cited from Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 292. 48 Petrarca, Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), 703. 49 Francesco Bruni, Italia: Vita e avventure di un’idea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), 67–103 and 123–145; John Larner, Italy in the Age of Dante and Petrarch: 1216–1380 (London: Longman Publishers, 1980), 3. 50 Antonio Stoppani, Il Bel Paese: Conversazioni sulle Bellezze Naturali, La geologia e la geografia fisica d’Italia (Milan: Lampi di Stampa, 2005). This updated version is printed from the fourth edition published in 1883 by Tipografia e Libreria Editrice Ditta Giacomo Agnelli. 51 Ibid., xi. 52 First published in 1827, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The betrothed) is considered Italy’s pre-eminent historical novel and often anchors the so-called canon of Risorgimento literature. For a critical view of Manzoni see Alberto Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell’Italia unita (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 46–9; Mario Isnenghi, Storia d’Italia: I fatti e le percezioni dal Risorgimento alla società dello spettacolo (Rome: Laterza, 2011), 69–80. 53 Stoppani, Il Bel Paese, xiv–xv. 54 Ibid., 256.

Notes to pages 64–9 237 55 Stephanie Hom Cary, “Destination Italy: Tourism, Colonialism, and the Modern Italian Nation-State, 1861–1947” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2007), 281–6. 56 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “Il bel paese,” Rivista del Touring Club Italiano (March 1908): 113. 57 Ibid. 58 Touring Club Italiano, Conosci l’Italia: Il Paesaggio, vol. 7 (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1963), 5. 59 Touring Club Italiano, Conosci l’Italia: Vademecum del turista (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1949), 3 and 5. 60 Touring Club Italiano, Guida d’Italia: Toscana (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 2008), 21. 61 “Belvedere,” Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, vol. 2 (Turin: UTET, 1967), 158. 62 Giannitrapani, Viaggiare, 67–70; Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 88–9. 63 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 1–15. 64 Ibid., 75. 65 Jonas Larsen, “Tourism Mobilities and the Travel Glance: Experiences of Being on the Move,” Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 1, no. 2 (2001): 81. 66 Ibid., 92–4. 67 Adler, “The Origins of Sightseeing,” 3–23. 68 Patricia C. Albers and William R. James, “Travel Photography: A Methodological Approach,” Annals of Tourism Research 15, no. 1 (1988): 134–58; Elizabeth Edwards, “Postcards: Greetings from Another World,” in The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth-Making in Tourism, ed. Tom Selwyn (New York: John Wiley, 1996), 197–221; Eric J. Evans and Jeffrey Richards, A Social History of Britain in Postcards, 1870–1930 (London: Longman, 1980); Wayne Martin Mellinger, “Toward a Critical Analysis of Tourism Representations,” Annals of Tourism Research 21, no. 4 (1994): 756–79; Tom Philips, The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Annette Pritchard and Nigel Morgan, “Representations of ‘Ethnographic Knowledge’: Early Comic Postcards of Wales,” in Discourse, Communication, Tourism, ed. Adam Jaworski and Annette Pritchard (Clevendon, UK: Channel View Publications, Multilingual Matters, 2005), 53–75; David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010); Bjarne Rogan, “An Entangled Object: The Picture Postcard as Souvenir and Collectible, Exchange and Ritual Communication,” Cultural Analysis 4 (2005): 1–27.

238  Notes to pages 69–74 69 Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski, Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 92–3. 70 Ibid., 91–125. See also Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 34–41. 71 John Wilton-Ely, introduction to Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1994), 2. 72 Sabine Poeschel, “Scherzi e fantasie: Piranesi und die venezianische Tradition des Capriccio,” in Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Die Wahrnehmung von Raum und Zeit, ed. Corinna Höper, Jeannette Stoschek, and Elisabeth Kieven (Marburg, Germany: Jonas Verlag, 2002), 21–36. 73 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le vedute di Roma, disegnate ed incise (Rome: A. Prosdocimi & C. Editori, 1927), ii. 74 Tarnya Cooper, “Forgetting Rome and the Voice of Piranesi’s ‘Speaking Ruins,’” in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 114. 75 Maria Antonella Fusco, “Il luogo ‘comune’ paesaggistico nelle immagini di massa,” In Storia d’Italia, ed. Cesare De Seta, vol. 5, Il paesaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 778. 76 Ibid., 780. 77 Peter Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 70–8; Rogan, “An Entangled Object,” 3–7. On tourism, photography, and geographic imagination see also Mike Robinson and David Picard, “Moments, Magic, and Memories: Photographing Tourists, Tourist Photographs, and Making Worlds,” in The Framed World: Tourism, Tourists, and Photography, ed. Mike Robinson and David Picard (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 1–38; Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vols. 1–2 (London: Phaidon, 2004); Joan M. Schwarz and James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003). 78 Crouch, “Flirting with Space”; Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 149. 79 Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 148. 80 Ibid., 1. See also Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 107–15. 81 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977), 167. 82 Larsen, “Tourism Mobilities,” 87. 83 MacCannell, The Tourist, 44–5. 84 Osborne, Travelling Light, 83–4.

Notes to pages 74–85 239 85 MacCannell, The Tourist, 45. 86 Béla Balász, “Visible Man, or the Culture of Film (1924),” trans. Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone, Screen 48, no. 1 (2007): 96. 87 Mary-Ann Doane, “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in Cinema,” differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 94. 88 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, rev. ed., comp. Ben Brewster (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47–9. 89 Larsen, “Tourism Mobilities,” 87. 90 Ibid., 92. 91 Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. P. Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), and The Vision Machine. 92 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald E. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 325. 93 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (London: Routledge, 2010), 65. 94 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 45. 3. Destination Nation 1 Massimo D’Azeglio, Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (Lugano, Switzerland: Tipografia della Svizzera Italiana, 1846); Giuseppe Mazzini, La Giovine Italia, ed. Mario Menghini (Rome: Società Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1902), first published in 1832. 2 John A. Davis, “Italy 1796–1870: The Age of the Risorgimento,” in The Oxford History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 194–7. 3 Ibid., 197. 4 Maxine Feifer, Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present Day (New York: Stein and Day, 1985), 163–200. 5 Clare Hornsby, introduction to The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond, ed. Clare Hornsby (Rome and London: British School in Rome, 2000), 3. 6 Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London: Spring Books, 1969), 15. 7 Cesare De Seta, “Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996), 13. 8 Representative examples of Grand Tour studies that focus on Italy include Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Attilio Brilli, Il viaggio in Italia: Storia di una grande tradizione

240  Notes to pages 85–90 culturale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006); and Cesare De Seta, L’Italia del Grand Tour: Da Montaigne a Goethe (Naples: Electa, 1992). On British tourists in Italy in the nineteenth century, and specifically the way in which guidebooks shaped their practices, see Jill Steward, “Performing Abroad: British Tourists in Italy and Their Practices, 1840–1941,” in Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance, and Place, ed. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 53–72. 9 Jean Claude Simoën, Viaggio in Italia (Milan: Rizzoli, 1994), 26. 10 Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 104–17. 11 Edward Gibbon, in a letter to his stepmother dated 20 June 1764, Private Letters of Edward Gibbon (1753–1794), ed. Rowland E. Prothero, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1896), 64. 12 Ibid., 64. 13 Goethe, Italian Journey, 209. 14 Hibbert, The Grand Tour, 111. 15 Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour, or a Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France, 3rd ed. (London: J. Rivington et al, 1778), 19. See also Jo Wheeler, “Stench in Sixteenth Century Venice,” in The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500, ed. Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 25–38. 16 Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 122. 17 Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, or a Compleat Journey through Italy in Two Parts. (London: John Starkey, 1670), 21. 18 Littlewood, Sultry Climates, 78–82. 19 Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, 118–31. 20 Brendon, Thomas Cook; Bill Cormack, A History of Holidays: 1812–1990, vol. 4, The History of Tourism: Thomas Cook and the Origins of Leisure Travel (London: Routledge, 1998); Dawes, La rivoluzione turistica; Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Edmund Swinglehurst, The Romantic Journey: The Story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), and his Cook’s Tours: The Story of Popular Travel (Poole, UK: Blandford Press, 1982); Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (London: Aurum Press, 1997). 21 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 137. 22 Brendon, Thomas Cook, 57. 23 Thomas Cook, “Past, Present, and Future. Pleasant Memories,” The Excursionist, 26 May 1859, 1. Throughout the history of Cook’s Excursionist the publication changed names several times. In 1862 it was known as Cook’s Excursionist and International Exhibition and Bazaar Advertiser. In

Notes to pages 90–7 241

24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39

1863 it became Cook’s Excursionist and International Tourist Advertiser. By 1866 the name had changed again to Cook’s Excursionist and European and American Tourist Advertiser. In 1870 it was the Cook’s Excursionist and Home and Foreign Tourist Advertiser. To avoid confusion, this chapter refers to the publication as the company does currently, The Excursionist. Graburn, “Tourism: The Sacred Journey,” 21–36. Thomas Cook, “Twenty-One!” The Excursionist, 19 October 1861, 1. Details of Cook’s first trip to Paris with the Working Men’s Committee were outlined in later versions of The Excursionist; see the issues of 7 May 1863 and 6 June 1863. Thomas Cook, “Tourist and Excursion Records: Our First Excursion to Italy,” The Excursionist, 2 August 1864, 2. Thomas Cook, Guide to Cook’s Tours in France, Switzerland, and Italy (London: Thomas Cook, 1865), 83. As cited in Swinglehurst, Romantic Journey, 70. Interestingly, this quote is cited often by scholars to represent stereotypical mass tourists. See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 87–8; Feifer, Tourism in History, 188; MacCannell, The Tourist, 9. Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 154–5. Thomas Cook, “Excursions and Tours in Prospect,” The Excursionist, 11 July 1865, 1. See the 25 April 1864 and 15 August 1871 issues of The Excursionist, respectively. Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 87. Thomas Cook, “Tourist Prospects for 1864,” The Excursionist, 25 April 1864, 6. Jill Hamilton, Thomas Cook: The Holiday-Maker (Thrupp Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 2005), 147–50; Mullen and Munson, “The Smell of the Continent,” 83–5. Adrian Lyttleton, “Politics and Society, 1870–1915,” in The Oxford History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 235–6. Cook, “Tourist and Excursion Records,” 2. The text on Italy is repeated almost verbatim in Cook’s 1865 guidebook to Italy; however, this invective against the Church was omitted. See Cook, Guide to Cook’s Tours in France, Switzerland, and Italy, 79–80. Thomas Cook, “The July Excursion to Switzerland, Italy, Venice, Vienna, &c,” The Excursionist, 2 August 1865, 5. Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia: Purgatorio, ed. Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Regio (Florence: Le Monnier, 1988), 107 (Purg. VI.113); Giacomo

242  Notes to pages 97–107 Leopardi, “Sopra il Monumento di Dante,” in Canti, ed. Ugo Dotti (Bologna: Feltrinelli, 1999), 226. 40 Thomas Cook, “Continental Excursions and Tours,” Second Supplement to Cook’s Excursionist, 13 August 1866, 1–2. 41 Cook, “Continental Excursions,” 3. 42 Thomas Cook, “The Work of 1866,” The Excursionist, 1 February 1867, 7. 43 Brendon, Thomas Cook, 108. 44 Charles H.L. Woodd, “The Cook Jubilee. To the Editor of the Times,” The Times, 4 August 1891. The Times was previously known as the Daily Universal Register, and the letter is also referenced in Brendon, but erroneously ascribed to Cook himself. 45 Michele Fratianni and Franco Spinelli, Storia monetaria d’Italia: Lira e politica monetaria dall’Unità all’Unione Europea (Città di Castello, Italy: ETAS, 2001); La moneta dell’Italia unita, dalla lira all’euro (Turin: Codice Edizioni, 2011). On Cook’s coupon system in Italy see Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 332–3; Dawes, La rivoluzione turistica, 82–4. 46 Thomas Cook, “The Next Italian Excursion,” The Excursionist, 4 July 1864, 4. 47 Cook, “July Excursion,” 4–5. 48 Thomas Cook, “New System of Italian Tours,” The Excursionist, 1 July 1868, 1. 49 Thomas Cook, “Preliminary Notes of Home and Foreign Tourist & Excursion Operations for 1870,” The Excursionist, 7 May 1870, 1–2. 50 Albert Schram, Railways and the Formation of the Italian State in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 117–22. 51 On the impact of Cook’s tours on economic development in Naples see Dawes, La rivoluzione turistica, 125–50. 52 Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, 284. 4. Tours of Duty 1 Davis, “Italy, 1796–1870,” 202–7. 2 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “Calabria e Basilicata: Cinque giorni di escursioni ciclistiche,” in Insoliti viaggi: L’appassionante diario di un precursore (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 2004), 30. 3 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “Progetto di una Guida d’Italia del T.C.I. per gli stranieri,” unpublished manuscript, busta 4, fasc, 2, p. 3. No date. Touring Club Italiano Archive. Also cited in Raniero Clerici, “Il ruolo del Touring Club Italiano negli anni del miracolo economico (dal tempo liberato al tempo organizzato),” (MA thesis, Università di Urbino, 2002), 286. 4 Choate, Emigrant Nation, 1; Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 3–5.

Notes to pages 107–14 243 5 Choate, Emigrant Nation, 154–8. 6 Ibid., 30–42. 7 Hom, “Empires of Tourism,” 281–300; and “The Fair and the Camp: Imperial Mobilities and the Interstitial Subject in Italian Colonial Libya” (conference paper, Brown University, Providence, RI, 15 June 2012). 8 Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 151–86. 9 Hom, “Empires of Tourism,” 289–94. 10 The representative scholarship on the Touring Club Italiano includes Bardelli, L’Italia viaggia 149–355; Berrino, Storia del turismo in Italia, 159–66; Pivato, Il Touring Club Italiano; Touring Club Italiano, 90 anni di turismo in Italia, 1894–1984 (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1984); Giuseppe Vota, I sessant’anni del Touring Club Italiano, 1894–1954 (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1954). 11 Vota, I sessant’anni, 11–12. 12 Ibid., 48. 13 Bardelli, L’Italia viaggia, 134–42. 14 Ibid., 141n202. 15 Ibid., 141. 16 “Relazione della Direzione Generale,” Rivista mensile del Touring (January 1899), as cited in Bardelli, L’Italia viaggia, 139n199. 17 Vota, I sessant’anni, 408–9 (appendix A). 18 Ibid., 55. 19 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 36. 20 Ibid., 46. 21 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli was clearly aware of the unifying power of these texts and their free distribution. See his “La forza del 50,000 soci del Touring: Una carta d’Italia all’1:250,000 gratis ai soci,” Rivista mensile del Touring (January 1906), 1–2. 22 Article III of the TCI statute, as cited in Vota, I sessant’anni, 417. 23 Brusa, “Dal Baedeker alle guide moderne,” 50–5; Di Mauro, “L’Italia e le guide turistiche dall’Unità ad oggi,” 392; Vota, I sessant’anni, 146–51. 24 Vota, I sessant’anni, 148. 25 Ibid., 146. 26 Touring Club Italiano, Guida d’Italia: Piemonte, Lombardia, Canton Ticino (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1914), 5–7. 27 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “La Guida d’Italia del TCI: Una grande opera di propulsione per il turismo,” Rivista Mensile del Touring (November 1912), 580. 28 Touring Club Italiano, Guida d’Italia: Piemonte, Lombardia, Canton Ticino (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1915), frontispiece insert.

244  Notes to pages 114–18 29 Emilio Gentile, La grande Italia: Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), 20–1. 30 Ibid., 21. 31 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “Una carovana commemorativa,” in L’Italia e il Touring negli scritti di Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli (Milano: Touring Club Italiano, 1927), 158. 32 Ibid., 141. For more on the festivities in Rome see Gentile, La grande Italia, 9–21. 33 Cristina della Colletta, World’s Fairs, Italian-Style: The Great Expositions in Turin and Their Narratives, 1850–1915 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 79–122. 34 Vota, I sessant’anni, 142. 35 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, “La carta della Tripolitania,” Rivista mensile del Touring 18 (January 1912), 2. 36 “Il Touring in Libia,” Rivista mensile del Touring 19 (Jan. 1913), 2; Hom, “Empires of Tourism,” 289–93. 37 Roberta Pergher, “A Tale of Two Borders: Settlement and National Transformation in Libya and South Tyrol under Fascism” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2007), 49–109. 38 Vota, I sessant’anni, 179. 39 Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, Nota sui criteri adottati per i toponimi nella Guida delle Tre Venezie del TCI (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1920); Di Mauro, “L’Italia e le guide,” 403. 40 Hom Cary, “Destination Italy,” 287–302. 41 Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 16. 42 Ibid., xxviii. On the appropriation of Italy’s past into the Fascist present see also Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: The Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Diane Ghirardo, “Architecture and the Fascist State, 1922–1943,” in Italy: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 65–130; D. Medina Lasansky, “Towers and Tourists: The Cinematic City of San Gimignano,” in Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 113–31. 43 Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 145–81 and 217–51; also see her “Tableau and Memory: The Fascist Revival of the Medieval/Renaissance Festival in Italy,” European Legacy 4, no. 1 (1999): 26–53. 44 Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 249.

Notes to pages 118–22 245 45 De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 1–23. 46 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241. 47 R.J.B. Bosworth, “Visiting Italy: Tourism and Leisure, 1860–1960,” in Italy and the Wider World (London: Routledge, 1996), 173. 48 Ibid., 175. 49 For detailed histories of all these organizations see R.J.B. Bosworth, “Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian Culture,” Contemporary European History 6, no. 1 (March 1997): 1–25; Silvio Manzati, Legislazione turistica (Bologna: Calderini, 1968); Anna Treves, “Anni di guerra, anni di svolta, il turismo italiano durante la prima guerra mondiale,” in Studi geografici sul paesaggio cisalpino, ed. Giorgio Botta (Milan: Goliardica, 1989), 249–99; and Assunta Trova, “Alle origini dell’Ente nazionale industrie turistiche e alberghiere (1939–1941),” Il Risorgimento 45, no. 2 (1993): 265–77. 50 Hom, “Empires of Tourism,” 281–3. 51 Michael Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 215–58. 52 On regional expressions of Fascist tourism policy (and Tuscany specifically) see Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 19–55. 53 Battilani, Vacanze, 219–20. 54 Vota, I sessant’anni, 256–7. 55 Ibid., 301–7. 56 Paul Corner, “Italy, 1915–1945: Politics and Society,” in The Oxford History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 277. 57 “Consociazione Turistica Italiana, Touring Club Italiano,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 43 (October 1937): 675–677; Vota, I sessant’anni, 301. 58 Taina Syrjämaa, Visitez L’Italie: Italian State Tourist Propaganda Abroad, 1919– 1943: Administrative Structure and Practical Realization (Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 1997), 235–45. 59 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National Leisure Hours Institution in Italy), (Rome: Società Editrice di Novissima, 1937), 1. 60 De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 4. For a contemporaneous account of the OND see Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London: V. Gollancz, Ltd., 1936), 330–7, and “Il Dopolavoro del Touring nella terra del Duce,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 41 (July 1935), 538–40. 61 De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 151. 62 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, 8–9.

246  Notes to pages 122–8 63 Ferruccio Farina, Una costa lunga due secoli: Storie e immagini della Riviera di Rimini (Rimini, Italy: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, 2003), 147–53. 64 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 86. 65 De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 181–4; Hom Cary, “Destination Italy,” 195–8. 66 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, National Leisure Hours Institution, 96–7. 67 Ibid., 101. For TCI membership statistics in 1937 see Vota, I sessant’anni, 304. 68 De Grazia, The Culture of Consent, 55 and 229. 69 Ibid., 55–6. 70 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1–14; Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Fascist Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–33. 71 Corner, “Italy, 1915–1945,” 288. 5. Masses in Transit 1 Aldo Saponaro, “Strano fenomeno: Lo smog,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 66, no. 3 (March 1960): 377. 2 Bruno Bolis, “La strada moderna,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 54, no. 5 (May 1948): 412-18; Enrico Caporali, “Fortuna degli ‘scooters,’” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 56, no. 8 (August 1950): 936–41; Alessandro Cruciani, “Televisione: Anno Uno,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 58, no. 5 (May 1952): 602–7; Francesco Pelagatti, “Ricostruzione ferroviaria: La direttissima Milano–Napoli,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 54, no. 3 (March 1948): 213–21; Felice Porro, “L’aviazione civile in Italia oggi,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 67, no. 1 (January 1961): 34–42; Raffaello Romano, “Invito al turismo aereo,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 65, no. 10 (October 1959): 1339–47; Alvise Zorzi, “TV: Inizio delle trasmissioni televisive,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 60, no. 1 (January 1954): 80–8. 3 Alberto Brambilla, “Le malattie dell’uomo motorizzato: riflessioni d’un medico,” Le Vie d’Italia: rivista mensile del TCI 59, no. 5 (May 1953): 660. 4 Ibid., 661–2. 5 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 282. 6 Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 75–129. 7 Löfgren, On Holiday, 271–3.

Notes to pages 128–33 247 8 Jean Baudrillard, La società dei consumi: I suoi miti e le sue strutture, trans. Gustavo Gozzi and Piero Stefani (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976), 39–64. 9 Gentile, Né Stato né nazione, 19–34. 10 Gary Cross, “Les Trois Huits: Labor Movements, International Reform, and the Origins of the Eight-Hour Day,” French Historical Studies 14, no. 2 (1985): 240–68; David Forgacs, “Twentieth Century Culture,” in The Oxford History of Italy, ed. George Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 314–15; E. Gryzanovski, “On the International Workingman’s Association: Its Origins, Doctrines, and Ethics,” The North American Review 114, no. 235 (April 1872): 345–6. 11 Gary Cross, “The Quest for Leisure: Re-Assessing the Eight-Hour Day in France,” Journal of Social History 18, no. 2 (1984): 195–216. 12 Corner, “Italy, 1915–1945,” 268–9. 13 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 229. 14 Ibid., 192–237; Berrino, Storia del turismo, 59–146. 15 Löfgren, On Holiday, 164. 16 Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2008), 6–12 and 75–6; Löfgren, On Holiday, 112–16. 17 Elaine Denby, Grand Hotels, Reality and Illusion: An Architectural and Social History (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 45–109. 18 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972), 256–60. 19 Robert Mighall, Sunshine: One Man’s Search for Happiness (London: John Murray, 2008); and his “History of Tanning,” The Times, 25 April 2008. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/article1962894.ece (accessed 8 August 2014); Giorgio Triani, Pelle di luna, pelle di sole: Nascita e storia della civiltà balneare, 1700–1946 (Venice: Marsilio, 1988), 141–73. 20 Farina, Una costa lunga due secoli. 21 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 267; also see her chapter, “Rimini: An Original Mix of Italian Style and Foreign Models?” in Europe at the Seaside: The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean, ed. Luciano Segreto, Carles Manera, and Manfred Pohl (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 107–8. 22 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 265. 23 Irene Vallone, “Il mare dei desideri,” Meridiani, special issue on RiminiRiviera Adriatica 8, no. 40 (July 1995): 26–33. 24 Mario Fazio, “Fortuna della riviera adriatica,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 66, no. 9 (September 1960): 1194. 25 David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 233–70.

248  Notes to pages 134–40 26 “Gli stranieri in Italia nel 1951,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 58, no. 5 (May 1952): 621. 27 Löfgren, On Holiday, 171–2. 28 MacCannell, The Tourist, 1. 29 Duccio Bigazzi, La grande fabbrica: Organizzazione industriale e modello americano alla Fiat dal Lingotto a Mirafiori (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000); Valerio Castronovo, Fiat: Una storia del capitalismo italiano (Milan: Rizzoli, 2005); Ernesto Galli della Loggia, “La Fiat e l’Italia,” in Grande impresa e sviluppo italiano, ed. Cesare Annibaldi and Giuseppe Berta (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 7–36. 30 John Foot, Modern Italy (London: Palgrave, 2003), 136. 31 Piero Bairati, Vittorio Valletta: La vita sociale della nuova Italia (Turin: UTET, 1983), 270. 32 Enrico Menduni, L’Autostrada del Sole (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 89–105. 33 Bruno Bolis, “La strada ideale,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 57, no. 7 (July 1951): 839. 34 Cesare Biffi, “L’autostrada del sole,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 63, no. 4 (April 1957): 421. 35 Pier Luigi Sagona, “Motel e autostelli,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 63, no. 8 (August 1957): 1053. 36 Sagona, “Motel e autostelli,” 1052. The Jolly hotel chain founded by Count Gaetano Marzotto in 1949 also emerged as a model for this new brand of automobile tourism. By 1955 Marzotto had opened forty-three hotels throughout Italy, most of them located along main thoroughfares in the south. These hotels were clean, modern accommodations, with a few more amenities than those of motels. Ariele De Stefani, “Gli Alberghi Jolly,” Le Vie d’Italia: Rivista mensile del TCI 60, no. 7 (July 1954): 877–84. 37 Pivato, Il Touring Club Italiano, 142. 38 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 334–5; Berrino, Storia del turismo, 248. 39 Löfgren, On Holiday, 157; Douglas G. Pearce, “Mediterranean Charters: A Comparative Geographic Perspective,” Tourism Management (December 1987): 291–305. The origins of charter flights are traceable to British government-sponsored “air trooping” contracts that kept independent airlines aloft in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These airlines moved soldiers, not tourists, en masse to former colonial holdings as well as to conflict zones. By the late 1950s, however, demand for these services waned, and airlines turned to tourists and all-inclusive tours to make up their losses. 40 Peter Lyth, “Flying Visits: The Growth of British Air Package Tours, 1945–1975,” in Europe at the Seaside: The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean, ed. Luciano Segreto, Carles Manera, and Manfred Pohl (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 17.

Notes to pages 140–4 249 41 Carles Manera and Jaume Garau-Taberner, “The Transformation of the Economic Model of the Balearic Islands,” in Europe at the Seaside: The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean, ed. Luciano Segreto, Carles Manera, and Manfred Pohl (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 34. 42 Louis Turner and John Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1976), 93–108; Steven A. Morrison and Clifford Winston, The Evolution of the Airline Industry (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), 61–3. 43 Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski, “Elite Mobility and Global Lifestyles: Inflight Magazines,” in Tourism Discourse (London: Palgrave, 2010), 43. 44 Ibid., 21. See also Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard, Tourism, Promotion, and Power: Creating Images, Creating Identities (Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 1998); Nigel Morgan, Annette Pritchard, and Roger Pride, Destination Branding: Creating the Unique Destination Proposition (London: Elsevier, 2002). 45 Carolyn Anderson, “Cold War Consumer Diplomacy and Movie-Induced Roman Holidays,” Journal of Tourism History 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–19. 46 Erik Amfitheatrof, The Enchanted Ground: Americans in Italy, 1760–1980 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 188. 47 Ibid., 190. 48 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 249–50 and 360. 49 Löfgren, On Holiday, 193. 50 Ellen Furlough, “Club Méditerranée, 1950–2002,” in Europe at the Seaside: The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean, ed. Luciano Segreto, Carles Manera, and Manfred Pohl (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 176. 51 Ibid., 186–9. 52 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 361. 53 Andrea Colli, “Piccole imprese e ‘piccole industrie’ in Italia sino al 1945,” in Storia d’Italia, ed. Franco Amatori et al., vol. 15, L’industria (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), 757–840. 54 The one notable exception was the development of the Costa Smeralda (Emerald Coast) in Sardinia, which was master planned by Harvardeducated businessman Karim Aga Khan IV in the 1960s and 1970s. See Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 278–87; Berrino, Storia del turismo, 283–4; Peter Odermatt, “A Case of Neglect? The Politics of (Re)presentation: A Sardinian Case,” in Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism, ed. Jeremy Bossevain (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), 84–111. 55 Giuseppe Soriero, “Le trasformazioni recenti del territorio,” in Storia d’Italia, le regioni dall’Unità a oggi: La Calabria, ed. Piero Bevilacqua and Augusto Placanica (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), 726.

250  Notes to pages 144–9 56 Ibid. 57 Despite Valtur’s steady profits, company leaders have been accused of corruption and collusion with the mafia. The company’s debt load had increased to almost €300 million in 2013, and according to some observers it appears to be on the brink of liquidation. Gianfrancesco Turano, “C’era una volta il villaggio Valtur,” L’Espresso, 11 March 2013. http://espresso​ .repubblica.it/affari/2013/03/11/news/c-era-una-volta-il-villaggiovaltur-1.51741 (accessed 8 August 2014). 58 Luciano Segreto, “Sending the Italians on Vacation: The Alpitour Group,” in Europe at the Seaside: The Economic History of Mass Tourism in the Mediterranean, ed. Luciano Segreto, Carles Manera, and Manfred Pohl (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), 101. 59 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 351. Similar to Alpitour, other successful Italian tour operators that were founded in the mid-twentieth century included Turisanda (1925, Milan), Hotelplan Italia (1947, Milan), Francorosso (1953, Milan), Orizzonti (1973, Milan), Viaggi dell’Elefante (1973, Milan), I viaggi del Ventaglio (1976, Milan), and Eurotravel (1983, Aosta). 60 Segreto, “Sending the Italians on Vacation,” 92. 61 “Gruppo Alpitour: Storia,” http://www.pubbliway.com/Turismo/ Gruppo_Alpitour_-_Alpitour_S.p.A._1122178?libera= (accessed 8 August 2014) 62 Segreto, “Sending Italians on Vacation,” 94. 63 Ibid., 94–5. 64 Battilani, Vacanze di pochi, 354. Battilani notes that, in comparison to other European companies, Italian tour operators were quite behind in organizing charter flights, beginning only in the late 1980s. 65 Ibid., 356. 66 Furlough, “Club Méditeranée,” 182 and 193n26. The Agnelli family purchased an 11.4 per cent minority stake in Club Med in the mid-1970s. By 1997 this share had grown to 19 per cent, and by 2003 it was up to 33 per cent, which rendered the Agnelli family the majority stakeholder in Club Med. They also owned shares in the tour companies Francorosso and I viaggi del Ventaglio. 67 Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” 36. 68 Löfgren, On Holiday, 181. 69 Alessandro Cento, The Airline Industry: Challenges in the 21st Century (Heidelberg, Germany: Physica-Verlag, 2009), 23. 70 Ibid., 78. 71 Sean D. Barrett, Deregulation and the Airline Business in Europe (London: Routledge, 2009), 59–77. 72 Cento, The Airline Industry, 20.

Notes to pages 149–59 251 73 Simon Calder, No Frills: The Truth behind the Low-Cost Revolution in the Skies (London: Virgin Books, 2008); Siobhán Creaton, Ryanair: The Full Story of the Controversial Low-Cost Airline (London: Aurum, 2004), 248; Rigas Doganis, The Airline Business (London: Routledge, 2006), 147–95; Lois Jones, EasyJet: The Story of Britain’s Biggest Low-Cost Airline (London: Aurum, 2007), 99–110. 74 Luca Baiada, Operazione Alitalia: Affari e politica, un modello per il capitalismo italiano (Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2011), 123. 75 Ibid., 144–5. 76 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 8; John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 194–203. 77 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 10. 6. Italy without Borders An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Italy without Borders: Simulacra, Tourism, Suburbia, and the New Grand Tour,” Italian Studies 65, no. 3 (2010): 376–97. It is reproduced with permission here. 1 Heinrich Klotz, ed., Postmodern Visions: Drawings, Paintings, and Models by Postmodern Architects (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 180. 2 Klotz, The History of Postmodern Architecture, 130. 3 Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986–7): 197. 4 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 327–59; Jameson, Postmodernism, 1–54. 5 In a letter to Max Horkheimer dated 9 May 1949, Theodore Adorno uses similar words to describe Benjamin’s philosophical project. As cited in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 73. 6 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 97. 7 Loïc Wacquant, “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” Social Anthropology 20 (2012): 66–79. 8 Ann Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219. 9 Jean-François Bayart, Global Subjects: A Political Critique of Globalization, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Polity, 2007), 185–208. 10 Stephanie Malia Hom, “Simulated Imperialism,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlement Review 25, no. 1 (2013): 25–44. 11 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), 149 and 156.

252  Notes to pages 159–64 12 Franci, Dreaming of Italy, 119. On Venice as the site of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, and contradictions and its relation to forms of modernism, see Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 13 Nezar AlSayyad, “Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism: Manufacturing Heritage, Consuming Tradition,” in Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–33. 14 Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, Las Vegas Visitor Profile Study 2012 (San Francisco: GLS Research, 2013), 8 and 12. http://www.lvcva​ .com/stats-and-facts/ (accessed 11 August 2014). 15 UN World Tourism Organization, World Tourism Highlights (New York: UNWTO, 2013), 6. 16 Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism,” 155. 17 On staged authenticity, see MacCannell, The Tourist, 91–107. 18 AlSayyad, “Global Norms,” 10–11. 19 Ibid., 4. 20 King of the Strip, dir. Simon Dickson (London: BBC Productions, 2000), film. See also Jonathan White, Italian Cultural Lineages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 80–2. 21 Raento and Flusty, “Three Trips to Italy,” 114–15. 22 Alan Rawes, Childe Harold, the Tales, and the Quest for Comedy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 117–38. 23 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195. See also Fredric E. Gushin and William J. Callnin, “Pro-Active Measures to Guarantee a Safer and More Secure Casino,” in The Business of Gaming: Economic and Management Issues, ed. William R. Eadington and Judy A. Cornelius (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1999), 241–54. On the historical relationship between gambling and Venice see Franci, Dreaming of Italy, 121–6. 24 Raento and Flusty, “Three Trips to Italy,” 119. 25 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 77–8. For Augé on tourism see also his “Contemporary Tourist Experience as Mise-en-Scène,” in Architourism, ed. Joan Ockman and Saloman Frausto (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 88–91; Per un’antropologia della mobilità, trans. Guendalina Carbonelli (Milan: Jaca Book, 2002). 26 Michael P. Branch, “Cosmology in the Casino: Simulacra of Nature in the Interiorized Wilderness,” in The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and

Notes to pages 164–9 253 Urban Environments, ed. Michael Bennett and David W. Teague (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 277–98. 27 Matthew Miller, “Billionaires: The Gambler [Sheldon Adelson],” Forbes (28 March 2005). http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2005/0328/142​ .html (accessed 30 November 2010). 28 Macau Government Tourist Office, Macau Travel and Tourism Statistics 2012 (Macau: Macau Government Tourist Office, 2013), 33. http://industry​ .macautourism.gov.mo/e-publication/MTTS2012/index_e.html (accessed 11 August 2014). See also Associated Press, “Venetian Macau Said to Draw 114,000 Visitors in First 24 Hours,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, 6 September 2007. http://www.reviewjournal.com/business/venetian-macau-saiddraw-114000-visitors-first-24-hours (accessed 12 August 2014). 29 Magda Antonioli Corigliano, “The Outbound Chinese Tourism to Italy: The New Graduates’ Generation,” Journal of China Tourism Research 7, no. 4 (2011): 396–410; Philip L. Pearce, Mao-Ying Wu, Manuela De Carlo, and Andrea Rossi, “Contemporary Experiences of Chinese Tourists in Italy,” Tourism Management Perspectives 7 (2013): 34–7. 30 In 2010 the Italian Ministry of Tourism launched this website to attract greater numbers of Chinese tourists to destination Italy: http://www​ .yidalinihao.com/. 31 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. 32 Ibid., 13; Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, 48; Louis Marin, “Disneyland, a Degenerate Utopia,” Glyph 1 (1977): 50–66. 33 Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 216. 34 Aviad E. Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 31–60. 35 Oriental Land Company Ltd., Annual Report 2009 (Tokyo Disney Resort), http://www.olc.co.jp/en/ir/library.html (accessed 29 November 2010). See also Yoko Shimatsuka, “Disney Goes to Sea,” The Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan 38, no. 12 (2001): 30–3. 36 Oriental Land Company Ltd., Annual Report 2011 (Tokyo Disney Resort), http://www.olc.co.jp/en/ir/library.html (accessed 11 August 2014). 37 Shinya Hatayama, ed., The Best Guide to DisneySea [東京ディズニーシーベ ストガイド], 3rd ed. (Tokyo: Kodansha Publishing, 2005). 38 Davis and Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze, 135–6. 39 Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard, “On Souvenirs and Metonymy: Narra­ tives of Memory, Metaphor, and Materiality,” Tourist Studies 5 (2005): 29–53.

254  Notes to pages 169–75 40 Japan Tourism Marketing Company, Japanese Overseas Travelers by Destination (5 February 2014). http://www.tourism.jp/en/statistics/ outbound/ (accessed 23 February 2014). 41 In Japan, simulated theme parks are nothing new. Since the 1980s myriad parks have been built that carefully simulate foreign monuments, villages, and cities. These “foreign villages” (known as ikoku-mura or gaikoku-mura) are typically full-scale simulacra. Two well-known examples are Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki Prefecture (a copy of the Dutch town of the same name) and Parque España in Mie Prefecture (a Spain-themed amusement park). See Nelson Graburn, “Multiculturalism, Museums, and Tourism in Japan,” in Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within, ed. Nelson Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 229–33; Raz, Riding the Black Ship, 147–55; Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Images of Empire: Tokyo Disneyland and Japanese Cultural Imperialism,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Smoodin (London: Routledge, 1994), 181–99. 42 Mike Davis, “Fear and Money in Dubai,” New Left Review 41 (2006): 53. 43 Davis, “Fear and Money,” 51 and 54. 44 The Imagineering Field Guide to Disneyland: An Imagineer’s Perspective (New York: Disney Editions, 2008), 66–7. 45 “Another Addition to Dubai’s Malls,” Gulf News (30 October 2002). http:// gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/general/another-addition-to-dubai-smalls-1.402095 (accessed 30 May 2012). 46 Ibid. 47 Jameson, Postmodernism, 12 and 17. 48 Deeba Haider, “The Growing Pains of Dubai: A City in Search of its Identity,” in The City in the Islamic World, eds. Salma K. Jayyusi, Renata Holod, Attilio Petruccioli, and André Raymond (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008), 1065. 49 Friedman, The World Is Flat, 42–7. 50 Deborah Philips makes the similar argument that Disneyland’s Main Street USA, with its pseudo-Victorian and Edwardian designs, resolves anxieties surrounding modernity, especially at the moment the park was constructed in the mid-1950s. Deborah Philips, “Consuming the West: Main Street USA,” Space and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002): 32. 51 Nezar AlSayyad, “The Ends of Tradition, or the Tradition of Endings?” in The End of Tradition?, ed. Nezar AlSayyad (London: Routledge, 2004), 8–12. 52 http://mercatoshoppingmall.com/ (accessed 11 August 2014). The text is cited from the previous version of the Mercato website (accessed 2 December 2010). The redesigned website makes similar claims that the

Notes to pages 175–81 255

53

54 55

56 57 58

59

60 61

62

Mercato is “more than a just a shopping mall,” the site of “the good life,” and “the very best of Italy in Dubai.” Hassan Fattah, “In Dubai, an Outcry from Asians for Workplace Rights,” New York Times (26 March 2006) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/ international/middleeast/26dubai.html?scp=1&sq=in%20dubai%20 an%20outcry%20from%20asians&st=cse&_r=0 (accessed 12 August 2014). Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4–5. Representative examples of the scholarship on suburbia include M.P. Baumgartner, The Moral Order of a Suburb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert A. Beauregard, When America Became Suburban (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Weise, eds., The Suburb Reader (London: Routledge, 2006). Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 265. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988), 102–3. Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA: Brookings Institution and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1997), 99–143; Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (London: Routledge, 2003), 111–52. http://www.sorrentoatdublinranch.com/ (accessed 30 November 2010). As of August 2014, the Sorrento at Dublin Ranch website has been deactivated. All of the homes in the subdivision have been sold, and some are reselling at even higher purchase prices. Sorrento at Dublin Ranch has been so successful that two expansions – the Piazza and Ravello – have been built nearby. Homes in these sectors begin at US$779,000. This surreal, suburban “Italy” also continues its expansion to the north with new subdivisions like Lucca, Positano, and Veneto and altogether comprise a manicured sprawl dressed up as “Italian” that scars the drought-stricken hills of northern California. The former website of Sorrento at Dublin Ranch is available at the Internet archive: https://web.archive.org/ web/20111113040621/http://www.sorrentoatdublinranch.com/ (accessed 13 August 2014). Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 45–6. Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 70–3; Peter O. Muller, The Outer City: The Geographical Consequences of the Urbanization of the Suburbs, Resource Paper no. 75-2 (Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers, 1976), 29–46. Lasansky, The Renaissance Perfected, 198.

256  Notes to pages 183–6 63 Allen Freeman, “That 70’s Show: In New Orleans, the Third Act Begins on a Famous Outdoor Stage,” Landscape Architecture (May 2004), http:// www.asla.org/lamag/lam04/may/feature3.html (accessed 12 February 2014); Richard A. Webster, “Piazza d’Italia to Undergo $250,000-Plus Renovation,” The Times-Picayune (23 May 2013) http://www.nola.com/ politics/index.ssf/2013/05/piazza_ditalia_to_undergo_reno.html (accessed 12 February 2014) 7. Postmodern Passages 1 Alessandro Sala, “Premier colpito a viso dopo il comizio,” Corriere della sera (13 December 2009). http://www.corriere.it/politica/09_dicembre_13/​ berlusconi-colpito-al-viso-da-manifestante_0cd154c4-e80e-11de-8657-​ 00144f02aabc.shtml (accessed 8 November 2010). 2 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 146. 3 Jacques Lacan describes these cuts and gaps on the body’s surface as erotogenic zones, and any passages through them can function to constitute subjects and bodies. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 314–15; Stewart, On Longing, 104–5. 4 Robert Mackey, “Berlusconi Attack Spurs Souvenir Sales,” New York Times, The Lede: New York Times New Blog (18 December 2009), http://thelede​ .blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/berlusconi-attack-spurs-souvenirsales/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed 11 August 2014). 5 Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 74–82. 6 Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 1–31. Virilio writes that the excesses of consumption resulted in the general mobilization of nations in the last century and are currently marked by the global mobilization of entire populations in transit. He predicts that the control of movement, of these travel flows, will become the paramount sphere in which political and economic power is staked and exercised in the coming century (22–3 and 41–2). See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–47. 7 Virilio, Futurism of the Instant, 38; Wacquant, “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology,” 66–79. 8 Virilio, Futurism of the Instant, 65. 9 Stoler, “Imperial Debris,” 191–219; Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” in Imperial Formations,

Notes to pages 186–91 257 ed. Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 3–42. 10 Stewart, On Longing, 135. 11 Ibid., 137–8. 12 Research on souvenir typologies includes Duccio Canestrini, Trofei di viaggio: Per un’antropologia dei souvenir (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001); Nelson Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 2–3; Michael Hitchcock and Ken Teague, eds., Souvenirs: The Material Culture of Tourism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000); Celia Lury, “The Objects of Travel,” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997), 75–95. 13 Although souvenirs are branded with place names to remind tourists of their locations, it is difficult to differentiate between souvenir shops across the de-territorialized geographies of touristic space. A souvenir shop in Waikiki might resemble one near the Trevi Fountain in Rome and vice versa. Their ornate exteriors, overwhelming interiors, and duplicate inventories comprise a generic landscape of disorientation across the globe, and, as such, the souvenir shop – the very locus of tourism’s material culture – generates a hyperscape that might be called “homogeneous postmodern.” 14 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 49. 15 Benson, “Reproduction, Fragmentation, and Collection,” 16–17; Fusco, “Il luogo ‘comune’ paesaggistico nelle immagini di massa,” 778. 16 Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts, 2–3; Stewart, On Longing, 148. 17 Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–16. 18 Ibid., 82–106; Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 115. 19 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 97. 20 Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 263–73. 21 Carlo Marco Belfanti and Fabio Giusberti, eds., Storia d’Italia: La moda (Turin: Einaudi, 2003); Ampelio Bucci, Vanni Codeluppi, Mauro Ferraresi, and Simona Ironico, Il Made in Italy: Natura, settori, e problemi (Rome: Carocci, 2011), 126–9; Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 75–145. 22 Jon Goss, “The Souvenir and Sacrifice in the Tourist Mode of Consumption,” in Seductions of Place: Global Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes, ed. Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (London: Routledge, 2005), 57.

258  Notes to pages 191–200 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45 46

Ibid., 59. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 101. Goss, “Souvenir and Sacrifice,” 57–9; Stewart, On Longing, 143. Mackey, “Berlusconi Attack Spurs Souvenir Sales.” Natalia Costa-Zalessow, “Italy as a Victim: A Historical Appraisal of a Literary Theme,” Italica 45, no. 2 (1968): 216–40, and her “Personification of Italy from Dante through the Trecento,” Italica 68, no. 3 (1991): 316–31; Stephanie Hom Cary, “Patria-otic Incarnations and Italian Character: Discourses of Nationalism in Ippolito Nievo’s Confessioni d’un Italiano,” Italica 84, no. 2–3 (2007): 214–32. Morgan and Pritchard, “On Souvenirs and Metonymy,” 29–53. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 3 and 6. Ibid., 1. Giancarlo Mola, “Berlusconi: ‘La mia biografia in tutte le famiglie italiane,’” La Repubblica (11 April 2001). http://www.repubblica.it/online/ politica/campagnacinque/libro/libro.html (accessed 3 June 2012). Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 25–6. Ibid., 26. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century ‘Exposé of 1935,’” in The Arcades Project, 4. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 114. Ibid., 117. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 71. Ibid., 70–1. S. Rambaldi and Russell Bekins, A Guide to Italia in miniatura (Forlì, Italy: Grafiche MDM, 2000), 3; Capolavori in corso, dir. Russell Bekins, DVD (Rimini, Italy: Italia in miniatura, 2009); Touring Club Italiano, Parchi di divertimento per bambini (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 2009), 156–7. “Italia in miniatura: Press Info 2010” (press kit provided to author by Antonella Bianchi, 9 August 2011), 3. Stewart, On Longing, 45. Davis, “Italy, 1796–1870,” 202–7. Stephanie Malia Hom, “On the Origins of Making Italy: Massimo D’Azeglio and ‘Fatta l’Italia, bisogna fare gli italiani,’” Italian Culture 31, no. 1 (2013): 1–16. Homi K. Bhabha, Introduction to Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1995), 4. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 88–92 and 138–40. Rambaldi and Bekins, A Guide to Italia in miniatura, 6.

Notes to pages 200–5 259 47 Ibid. 48 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 17 (London: Hogwarth Press, 1955), 247. 49 Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 107. See also Tim Oakes, “Tourism and the Modern Subject: Placing Encounter between Tourist and Other,” in Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed Landscapes, ed. Carolyn Cartier and Alan A. Lew (London: Routledge, 2005), 36–55. 50 Rambaldi and Bekins, A Guide to Italia in miniature, 6. 51 Said, Orientalism, 40. 52 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 246. 53 Stewart, On Longing, 86–93. 54 Ibid., 86. 55 Ibid., 102. 56 Antti Aarne, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (Verzeichnis der Märchentypen), ed. and trans. Stith Thompson (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1964), 57 (cf. tale types 312 and 328); Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “Jack Tales,” in Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 266–8. 57 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 8; Virilio, Futurism of the Instant, 32–43. 58 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 62–3. 59 Baudrillard, La società dei consumi, 3–10; Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 9; Mauro Ferraresi, “Identità fredde: Lineamenti per una Identity MediaConsumer Theory,” in Next: Identità tra consumo e comunicazione, ed. Alberto Abruzzese and Mauro Ferraresi (Bologna: Fausto Lupetti Editore, 2009), 11–33. 60 Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 8. 61 Ibid., 22. 62 William Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 337–42. 63 Baudrillard, La società dei consumi, 77; Arthur Asa Berger, Shop ’Til You Drop: Consumer Behavior and American Culture (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 16–18. 64 Scott A. Lukas, introduction to The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self, ed. Scott Lukas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 1–22.

260  Notes to pages 207–12 65 Aldo Cazzullo, Outlet Italia: Viaggio nel paese in svendita (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), 12. See also Arnaldo Greco, Nomi, cose, città: Viaggio nell’Italia che compra (Rome: Fandango, 2009). 66 For a list of outlet malls see http://www.ultimoprezzo.com/outlet.htm (accessed 4 June 2012). 67 Patrizia Calvario and Lorenzo Calvario, “In città: Due Messe al centro commerciale Roma Est,” RomaSette (26 September 2008), http://www​ .romasette.it/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3802 (accessed 4 June 2012). 68 Cazzullo, Outlet Italia, 3–17. 69 Alessandro Bindi and Luca Serafini, “Primo assalto del popolo dei saldi,” Corriere di Arezzo, 6 January 2012, 1. In May 2014 the Blackstone Group, an American private equity firm, purchased the Valdichiana Outlet Village for €170 million. “L’outlet di Foiano passa di mano: Acquistato dal colosso Blackstone per 170 milioni,” La Nazione, 24 May 2014. http://www .lanazione.it/arezzo/cronaca/2014/05/24/1069632-outlet_foiano_passa_ mano_acquistato_colosso_blackstone_milioni.shtml (accessed 11 August 2014). 70 Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2007), ix–xvi. 71 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 263. 72 Valdichiana Outlet Village, print advertisement, 7. 73 Temporal isolation is a well-documented feature of the shopping centre. Malls strive to accomplish what is known as “the Gruen transfer,” or the moment when a destination buyer transforms into an impulse shopper. This transformation can be recognized by a change in the shopper’s gait, from determined stride to meandering stroll. Malls have largely succeeded in accomplishing this transfer through architectural form and thus have extended the average mall visit from twenty minutes in 1960 to more than three hours today. Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” 14; Kowinski, The Malling of America, 339–42. 74 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 22–3. 75 Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” 27. 76 Virilio, Futurism of the Instant, 38. 77 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Mob Porn,” in Crowds, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Matthew Tiews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1–45. 78 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135–69. 79 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 73 and 161. 80 Ibid., 68. 81 Ibid., 163.

Notes to pages 214–20 261 Conclusion 1 Las Vegas Sands Corporation, 2013 Annual Report. http://investor .lasvegassands.com/annuals.cfm; Las Vegas Sands Corporation, “Earnings Release. Second Quarter 2014.” http://investor.lasvegassands.com/results. cfm (both accessed 11 August 2014). 2 Hom, “On the Origins of Making Italy,” 1–16. 3 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 81. 4 UN World Tourism Organization, World Tourism Highlights. 2013 Edition, 6. 5 Choate, Emigrant Nation, 21–56; Jennifer Gugliemo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America (London: Routledge, 2003); Thomas Gugliemo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14–38. 6 Simonis et al, Lonely Planet: Italy, 6th ed., 41. 7 Wacquant, “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology,” 66–79. 8 Brian L. McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivlent Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 26–7 and 57–9, and his “Tripoli Trade Fair and the Representation of Italy’s African Colonies,” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24 (2002): 171–97; Krystyna von Henneberg, “Public Space and Public Place: Italian Fascist Urban Planning at Tripoli’s Colonial Trade Fair,” in Italian Colonialism, ed. Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 155–65. 9 Giuseppe Borghetti, “Alla III Fiera di Tripoli: La svolta economica,” L’Italia Coloniale 6, no. 5 (1929): 83. 10 Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2007), 151–70. 11 Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? Un mito duro a morire (Vicenza, Italy: Neri Pozza Editore, 2005), 44–51. See also Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, eds., Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave, 2005). 12 Hom, “Simulated Imperialism,” 25–44. 13 Zygmunt Bauman, Collateral Damage, and his Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 9. 14 Elliott and Urry, Mobile Lives, 45–83; Urry, Mobilities, 3–16.

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Index

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. Abruzzo, 107 Accor Group, 147 Adelson, Sheldon, 161, 163 Adorno, Theodor, 15, 251n5 advertising slogans and strategies, 146, 162–3, 174–5, 254n52 Aer Lingus, 148 African colonies, 7, 107, 116, 119–20, 219–20 Aga Khan IV, Karim, 249n54 Agip motels, 137 Agnelli, Giovanni, 148 Agnelli family, 146–7, 250n66 Air France, 148 Air One, 150 air travel: Alitalia’s partnership with Alpitour, 145; charter flights, 139–40, 146, 150, 248n39, 250n64; jet engines, advent of, 140–2, 141, 146; low-cost carriers, 24, 148–50 Albania, 107, 119, 150, 219 Alessandria, 102 Alitalia, 141, 145, 148, 150 Alpieagles, 150 Alpitour, 144–7

Alps, 14, 92, 110, 130, 197 AlSayyad, Nezar, 161 Al Zarouni Group, 171 Amatrice, 14 Amfitheatrof, Erik, 142 Anderson, Benedict, 112 Aosta, 250n59 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 20, 156 architecture: Dubai’s mega-projects, 170; Fascist regime’s manipulation of, 10, 117–18; housing developments, Italianate, 17, 176–82, 255n59; illegal or negligent resort construction, 144; on Mediterranean coast, as homo­ genized, 148; Mercato shopping mall as architectural pastiche, 19, 171, 172, 173; Piazza d’Italia’s postmodern qualities, 155–6, 157, 182–3; postmodern structures as disorienting, 31, 209–10, 214; shopping malls, rise of, 204, 207; shopping malls’ layout as promoting consumption, 260n73; and study of Italian simulacra, 18; suburbia, history of, 176, 181; at Tripoli Trade

294 Index Fair, 219; Valdichiana Outlet Village’s Tuscan architecture, 206, 207, 209–10; Valmontone Fashion District’s architectural styles, 3–4, 5; Venetian Hotel and Casino’s monumental signifiers, 159, 160 Arezzo, 117, 198, 205, 207, 209 ars apodemica (the art of travel), 37–8, 230n37 Associazione del Pubblico Impiego, 120 Augé, Marc, 164 Aurelian walls, Rome, 35, 83 Australia, 7, 119, 215 Austria-Hungary, 83, 94–5, 97, 116 Automobile Club d’Italia (ACI), 137 automobiles: bus tours, 133–4; Fiat’s role in modernizing Italy, 135–6, 146; highways, construction of, 135, 136–7, 138, 139; and motels, 135, 137, 139, 248n36; and pathology of motorization, 127–8; and suburbia or malls, 177, 208; and villaggi turistici, 24 autostelli (ACI-run motels), 137 Autostrada del Sole (A1 highway), 135, 136, 137, 138, 208 Avanguardisti, 123 Aventine, 36 Baedeker, Karl: collaboration and competition with Murray, 42–3, 44; and Forster’s A Room with a View, 30; guidebooks, overview of, 45–6; and Pausanias, 33; and rise of guidebooks and destination Italy, 7, 32, 43, 46–7, 50; and Starke, 41, 42; and Touring Club Italiano guidebooks, 113 Baitani, Piero, 148

Balázs, Béla, 75 Baldinini (brand), 208 Balearic Islands, 140, 141 Balfour, Andrew, 38 Balilla, 123 Balkans, 144 Banca d’Italia, 126 Bardelli, Daniele, 110 Bari, 110 Barthes, Roland, 14, 44, 51, 112, 125 Basilicata, 105, 106, 107, 110, 199 Batali, Mario, 213 Battilani, Patrizia, 131, 143, 250n64 Baudrillard, Jean: on California, 177; on commodification, 205; on Disneyland, 165; on montage, 169; on simulation, 12, 193–5, 212 Bellagio, Las Vegas, 9, 18 Belle Air, 150 Bel Paese, Il (Stoppani), 63–4, 66 bel paese, il (the beautiful country), as topos, 51–2, 53, 62–7, 118, 125 belvedere (panoramic viewpoints), 68, 69 Benevento, 110 Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, 122 Benjamin, Walter: on Fascism, 118, 125; on fashion, 191; on the monad, 208; and montage, 20–1, 156; on Naples, 16; on the wish image, 194 Benson, Sarah, 40 Berlusconi, Silvio, 184–5, 192–4 Bertarelli, Luigi Vittorio: and cycling excursions, 108–10, 109; and Italian colonies and irredentist lands, 116; political neutrality of, 112; and publishing arm of Touring Club Italiano, 111, 113, 243n21; on Stoppani, 64; on

Index 295 unifying power of domestic tourism, 105–6, 110, 115 Bhabha, Homi, 199–200, 201 biennio rosso (red biennium), 129 Biffi, Cesare, 137 Blackstone Group, 260n69 Blu-Express, 150 Bolis, Bruno, 136 Bollati, Giulio, 222n9 Bologna, 85, 92, 96, 98, 102, 207 Bonardi, Carlo, 120–1 boom economico (economic miracle), 126, 128, 135, 146 Borgata mall, Scottsdale, 19, 205 Bosworth, R.J.B., 119 Bourbon, House of, 105, 197 Brambilla, Alberto, 127–8 brands, globalization of, 19, 173, 189, 190, 208–9, 210 Braudel, Fernand, 130–1 bread and circuses, 5 Breda company, 143 Brindisi, 102, 103 British Airways, 148 British tourists. See under United Kingdom Bruno, Giuliana, 224n28 Buck-Morss, Susan, 189, 191, 194 Buenos Aires, 119 built environment. See architecture Burj Al Arab, Dubai, 170 Burj Khalifa, Dubai, 170, 171 bus tours, 133–4 Buzard, James, 42–3 Buzzati, Dino, 214 Byron, Lord, 7, 162–3 Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas, 9, 18 Calabria: cycling excursions to, 110; emigration from, 107; and

Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand, 105, 115; motels in, 137; and Touring Club Italiano’s tourism campaign, 106; villaggi turistici in, 142, 143, 144 Calcio Storico (Historic Soccer), 117 California: conceptualizations of, 177; Lake Merritt in Oakland, 17; North Beach in San Francisco, 215; Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, 176–82, 255n59. See also Disneyland; Los Angeles Calvino, Italo, 214 Camicissima (brand), 208 Campania, 40, 107, 178 Canti (Leopardi), 193 Canzoniere (Petrarch), 62–3, 193 Capitoline Wolf with Romulus and Remus, 71, 72, 74 Capo Rizzuto, 143 capriccio paintings, 40, 188–9 Caracalla, Emperor, 33 cars. See automobiles Caserta, 110 Casilino 900 camp, 234 Cassa del Mezzogiorno (Southern Development Fund), 137, 143 Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, 35, 36, 76 Catholicism: Cook’s views on, 94, 95–6, 241n37; Grand Tour guidebooks’ views on, 38, 39–40; Holy Week in Rome, 85; jubilee of 2000, 61; masses held in malls, 207; and mid-nineteenth-­century power struggles, 83, 94, 95; nativity scenes (presepi), 192; non expedit policy, 95–6; and organized tourism, 133. See also specific Catholic sites Cazzullo, Aldo, 207 Cesenatico, 133

296 Index Charlemagne, 34 charter flights, 139–40, 146, 150, 248n39, 250n64 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 162–3 China: Italian souvenirs made in, 187; Tianjin colonization, 107; tourists travelling to Italy, 165, 253n30; Venetian-Macao, 17, 164–5, 214; in world tourism rankings, 7, 215 Choate, Mark, 106–7 Christian Democrats, 125 “Ciao Bella” T-shirts, 189–92, 190 Cinecittà, 5 cinema. See film Circus Flaminius, Rome, 35 Circus Maximus, Rome, 36 Civitavecchia, 102 Classen, Constance, 51 close-up, as postcard view, 52, 68, 71–6, 74 Club Air, 150 Club Méditerranée, 143–4, 146, 250n66 Coca-Cola (brand), 189 colonialism: “air trooping” to former colonies, 248n39; Cook’s touristic mission compared to, 91–2; decolonization following Second World War, 125, 128; and Italia in miniatura theme park, 201; Italian colonies, 7, 107–8, 117–18, 119–20, 125, 219–20; Italian simulacra as imperial formations, 158–9, 165, 175, 182, 186–7; and Orientalist writings, 53; Roman triumphal arches as commemorating, 3–4 Colonia Novarese, 122, 123 Colosseum, Roman: Christian pilgrims’ admiration of, 35; in

montage postcards, 76, 77; panoramic views of, 69, 70, 72, 73; and paraphernalia of tourism, 14; popularity of, evidenced by tourist crowds, 29; sacralization of, by early foreign tourists, 7; souvenirs emblazoned with, 169; themepark simulations of, 4–5 Columbus, Christopher, 199 Commissariato per il Turismo, 119, 121 communism, 125–6, 133 Como, 88 Como, Lake, 92 Compagnia Italiana per il Turismo (CIT), 119, 121 Comte, Auguste, 64 Conosci l’Italia series (Touring Club Italiano), 64–6 Consociazione Turistica Italiana (CTI), 121 consumption: advertising slogans and strategies, 146, 162–3, 174–5, 254n52; brand logos and personal identity, 189; car culture, rise of, 135–6; as civic duty, 204; at Disney theme parks, 17, 168–9; Dubai as luxury-consumer paradise, 170; and guidebook tropes, 53, 60; hyperreality and consumer ideology, 17, 19–20, 157–8, 185–6, 205, 208, 210–11; ipermercati (hypermarkets), rise of, 207; at Mercato shopping mall, Dubai, 19–20, 171, 173–5, 205, 207–8; as modern bread and circuses, 5; package tours, commodification of, 126, 128, 133, 145–6, 148, 150; slow consumption, 186, 207–8, 210, 211, 218; souvenir shops, commodity

Index 297 excess of, 187, 188; temporal aspects of, 209, 210, 260n73; at Valdichiana Outlet Village, 186, 207, 209–10, 218 Cook, John, 103 Cook, Thomas: as British domestic tour guide, 84, 88–90; Catholic Church, views on, 94, 95–6, 241n37; coupon system, 88, 98–9, 100, 101, 102–4; and female travellers, 46; first organized tour of Italy, 84, 87–8, 92–3, 106; Italian unification, promotion of, 84, 88, 93–9, 107; and modern mass tourism, 7, 46, 85, 88, 91–2, 104, 217; photographs of, 89, 94 Cooper, Tarnya, 70 Corsica, 140 Costa Coffee (brand), 173 Costa Concordia (cruise ship), 11 Costa Smeralda, 249n54 Crawford, Margaret, 211 Crispi, Francesco, 107 Croatia, 116 cruise ships, 11, 13, 122, 144 Culler, Jonathan, 161 Cuneo, 145 cycling excursions, 108–11, 109, 115 Cyrenaica, 116 Czech Republic, 187 Dante Alighieri, 61, 62–3, 97, 193, 199, 236n44 Davis, Mike, 170, 207 Davis, Robert, 168 D’Azeglio, Massimo, 54–5, 56, 83, 95, 197, 214 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 86 De Grazia, Victoria, 107, 122, 125

democratization of travel, 84, 91, 110, 142, 145, 223n18 De Niro, Robert, 199 De Sando, Stefano, 199 Description of Greece (Pausanias), 32–4, 228n17 De Staël, Madame, 9 destination Italy: arc of development, summarized, 7; author’s ­arguments on, summarized, 9, 22–6, 216–18; defined, 5–6; globalization dissociated from, 6, 10–11, 16–17, 20, 218; guidebooks’ representation of (see guidebooks, functions and features of; guidebooks, history of); and hyperreality, overview of, 11–12, 17–20; Italian state as weak and fractured vs., 6, 8, 31, 47, 59, 104, 128–9, 150–1; and low-cost carrier revolution, 150; and method of montage, 20–2; and postmodernism, overview of, 13–17; questions for future research, 218–20; simulations of (see simulacra of Italy, domestic; simulacra of Italy, global); tradition and authenticity associated with, 6, 10–11, 22, 215; Unification of Italy tied to emergence of, 7, 84, 88, 93–104, 217 Dicaearchus of Messana, 32 Dickie, John, 57 Direzione Generale del Turismo (DG), 119, 120, 121 Disneyland: and conceptualizations of California, 177; hyperreality of, 17, 20, 165–6, 169–70, 215; Main Street USA, 17, 171, 254n50; as model of postmodernity, 18; and suburbia, 176; Venice as

298 Index resembling, 13. See also Tokyo DisneySea Divina Commedia, La (Dante), 62–3, 193 Doane, Mary Ann, 75 Dodecanese, 107, 219 dolce far niente, il (the sweet art of idleness), as trope: vs. la dolce vita trope, 59, 61; Italian-language guidebooks’ avoidance of, 59, 62; and Italy as land of leisure, 52, 125, 178; origins and development of, 53–9 Dolce Vita, La (film), 59–60, 141 dolce vita, la (the sweet life), as trope: and consumption of Italy, 53, 60; as guidebook stereotype, 14, 49, 50; and Italy as cohesive entity, 8; and Italy as land of leisure, 6, 52, 62, 125, 174–5, 178–81; as masking control mechanisms, 165, 182; origins and development of, 59–62 Dolomites, 60, 197 Dubai, overview of, 170. See also Mercato shopping mall, Dubai dubbing (voice-overs), 199–200 Dublin, 149 Dublin Ranch, California, 176–82, 255n59 EasyJet, 24, 149 Eco, Umberto, 17, 20, 165 economic downturn of 2008, 149, 182 Einsidlensis, 35, 36, 229n26 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 136 Ekberg, Anita, 59 Elliott, Anthony, 151 Elsner, Jas’, 33 emigration from Italy: and colonial expansion, 7, 107, 108, 119; Italian

American immigrants returning as tourists, 141; as largest voluntary emigration in history, 7, 106–7; and “Little Italy” neighbourhoods abroad, 215; New Orleans’s Italian immigrant community, 155; and la povera Italietta (poor little Italy), 60 Emilia-Romagna, 99, 130 England. See United Kingdom Ente Nazionale Industrie Turistiche ed Alberghiere (ENITEA), 119, 121 Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche (ENIT), 118–19, 121 Ente Turistico Albanese (ETA), 119 Ente Turistico ed Alberghiero della Libia (ETAL), 119 environmental destruction, 10–11, 127, 144 Eritrea, 7, 107, 219, 220 Ethiopia, 107, 219 Eurocity stores, 207 Euronics, 207 European Union, 148, 149 Eurotravel, 250n59 Excursionist (newspaper), 90–1, 93–7, 99, 102, 240n23 Expedition of the Thousand (Spedizione dei Mille), 105–6, 107, 115, 197 Fascist Italy: built environment, manipulation of, 10, 117–18; ­bureaucratization of tourism, 118–21; campaign to help Italians to know Italy, 24, 107–8; crowd control, 212; culture of consent linked to tourism, 107, 122, 125, 217; and dubbing, 199; lodging options in, 129–30; OND leisure

Index 299 program, 107, 111, 118, 120, 121–5, 124 fashion, 3, 189–91 fast food, 5, 10 Fellini, Federico, 59–60, 61, 214 Fergola, Salvatore, 70 Ferragosto, 8 Fiat, 135–6, 138, 146 Fiera di Tripoli (Tripoli Trade Fair), 219–20 Filarete, 181 film: close-up views in, 75; and la dolce vita trope, 59–60; dubbing with Italian voices, 199–200; Fellini and Loren as cultural symbols, 61; Italian films as enticing U.S. tourists, 141; postcards’ similarities to, 77; and postmodernism, 214; travel-film genre, 224n28; video recorders, tourists’ use of, 67, 76 Florence: Calcio Storico, 117; Cook’s criticism of, 96, 97; and Cook’s organized tours, 88, 92, 93, 98, 102, 103, 104; in Dante’s Inferno, 63; as former capital, 47, 84; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85, 163; leather market, 10, 19; the Mall outlet centre, 191; Santissima Annunziata church, 41; simulations of, 19, 171, 202, 205; Tokyo DisneySea’s simulation of, 17, 18, 166; Uffizi Gallery souvenirs, 14; and Valdichiana Outlet Village, 208; work habits in, vs. Naples, 57 Flusty, Steven, 164 Fodor’s Italy, 50, 57 Foot, John, 148 Forster, E.M., 30, 60 Forum, Roman, 5, 36, 70, 76, 77

Foucault, Michel, 71 France: and airline deregulation, 148; Club Méditerranée corporation, 144; Cook’s coupon system in, 99, 102; Cook’s organized tours to, 92; in Dante’s writings, 63, 236n44; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85; guidebook tradition in, 232n5; and Mirabilia Urbis Romae, 37; Nice as tourist destination, 130, 131, 145; Nouvelles Frontières company, 147; Parisian arcades, 16, 21; siege of Rome (1849), 83; in world tourism rankings, 7 Franci, Giovanna, 159 Francorosso, 147, 250n59, 250n66 Fratianni, Michele, 99 Frazer, James G., 33 Freud, Sigmund, 200–1 Frommer’s Italy, 60 Fujifilm, 169 Fuller, Mia, 219 Fusco, Maria Antonella, 70 García Márquez, Gabriel, 48 Gardaland, 5 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 83, 105–6, 107, 115, 197, 198 Gassman, Vittorio, 59 gender: and “Ciao Bella” T-shirts, 189; female travellers, early, 46, 87; guidebooks’ masculine viewpoint, 46; and personifications of Italy, 193; and Starke’s textual authority, 41–2 Genoa: and Cook’s organized tours, 88, 93, 102, 103; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85; Italia in miniatura’s simulation of, 195, 199 Gentile, Emilio, 8–9, 10, 114

300 Index Gentleman’s Guide, The (Martyn), 39 Germany: and airline deregulation, 148; bus tourists from, 134; civil servant Heinrich Zschokke, 56, 235n24; Grand Tourists from, 85; guidebooks in German, 37, 39–40, 42–3, 45, 232n5 (see also Baedeker, Karl); and Italian work habits, 56–7; Preussag Group, 147; Rimini as tourist destination for soldiers, 132; tourism as economic salvation for, 128 Gibbon, Edward, 86 Ginsborg, Paul, 9 Giostra del Saraceno (Joust of the Saracen), 117 Giotto’s Campanile, Florence, 19, 171 gladiators, 4–5, 192 globalization: of brands, 19, 173, 189, 190, 208–9, 210; defined, 6; destination Italy as respite from, 6, 10–11, 16–17, 20, 218; and family-run companies, 147; and “glocalization,” 207–8; and mobility, 151, 204, 211, 212, 220, 256n6; and neoliberalism, 10, 22, 25–6, 187, 217, 218–19; postcards as enactments of, 69; simulations of Italy abroad (see simulacra of Italy, global); social inequities of, 141, 158, 185–7, 216, 220 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 39, 85 gondolas: and Cook’s praise of Venice, 97; in Oakland, California, 17; at Tokyo DisneySea, 167, 168, 169; at Venetian casino-resorts, 159, 160, 161–2, 164, 213; and Venice’s theme-park atmosphere, 13

Goss, Jon, 191 Graburn, Nelson, 189 Grand Tour: and Byron, 7, 162–3; characteristics and purpose of, 37, 85–7, 216; as Cook’s inspiration for organized tours, 84–5, 93; and democratization of travel, 223n18; guidebooks on, 32, 37–42; and Italy’s enduring tourist appeal, 6, 7, 30; and modern guidebooks’ emphasis on aesthetic education, 51–2, 61, 62, 67; and modern lowcost carrier revolution, 150; and panorama as mode of vision, 52, 69–71; and sexual pleasures, 39, 51, 87; and sightseeing canon, 12; and souvenirs, 40, 69, 188–9 Grand Tour (Nugent), 39, 87 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Greece, ancient, 32–4, 228n17 Gruen, Victor, 204 Gruen transfer, 260n73 Guida d’Italia series (Touring Club Italiano), 43, 62, 66–7, 113–14 Guida-itinerario dell’Italia (Touring Club Italiano), 111–12 guidebooks, functions and features of: aesthetic beauty, emphasis on, 37, 39–40, 51–2, 60–1, 62, 66–7; author’s arguments on, summarized, 23, 52, 216; Baedeker’s innovations to, 45; il bel paese topos, overview of, 62–7; creation of imagined community, 112; il dolce far niente trope, overview of, 53–9; la dolce vita trope, overview of, 59–62; in Italian- vs. English-language guidebooks, 51–2, 59, 62; Italy for Dummies as illustrative of, 31, 49– 50, 61; leisure, emphasis on, 30–1,

Index 301 52, 57–9, 62; Murray’s innovations to, 43–4; postcards’ similarities to, 78, 80; as postmodern, 14–15, 31; sensory stimulation, emphasis on, 40, 47, 50–1, 52–3, 58, 60–1; Starke’s innovations to, 41–2 guidebooks, history of: author’s arguments on, summarized, 23, 216; Baedeker’s guidebooks, overview of, 45–6; destination Italy’s simultaneous rise, 7, 30, 32, 43, 46–7, 50; Grand Tour guidebooks, overview of, 32, 37–42; Murray’s guidebooks, overview of, 43–4; Pausanias’s Description of Greece, 32–4, 228n17; pilgrimage manuals, 32, 34–7, 229n26; Touring Club Italiano’s guidebooks, overview of, 111–14 Gundle, Stephen, 60 Handbook for Northern Italy (Murray), 43, 44 Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy and Rome (Murray), 43–4 Handbook for Travellers on the Continent (Murray), 42 Handbuch für Reisende (Baedeker), 42 Hapsburg, House of, 83 Harvey, David, 156 Herculaneum, 86 Herodotus, 32 Hibbert, Christopher, 85, 86 highways, construction of, 135, 136–7, 138, 139 Historisch-kritische Nachrichten von Italien (Volkmann), 39–40 hivernants, les (winter tourists), 130–1 holiday villages or resorts. See villaggi turistici

Holy Roman Empire, 34 Homer, 32 Horkheimer, Max, 15 Hotelplan Italia, 144, 250n59 hotels: Alpitour’s “Hotel Italian Style,” 146–7; Cook’s coupon system, 98, 99, 101, 102–3, 104; under Fascism, 118, 119, 123, 129–30; grand hotel era, 130–2; motor-­ hotels, 135, 137, 139, 248n36. See also specific hotels housing developments, Italianate, 17, 176–82, 255n59 Howell, James, 38, 51 Huis Ten Bosch theme park, Japan, 254n41 human rights violations, 175 Hungary, 150 Hutcheon, Linda, 156 hypermarkets (ipermercati), 207 hyperreality: Baudrillard’s conceptualization of, 12, 193; of Berlusconi, 193; and consumer ideology, 17, 19–20, 157–8, 185–6, 205, 208, 210–11; and control mechanisms, 158–9; and destination Italy, overview of, 11–12, 17–20; of Disney theme parks, 17, 20, 165–6, 169–70, 215; domestic (Italian) order of, 25, 185; gondolas as signifiers of hyperreal Venice, 168; and Italian imperialism, 219–20 Ifil, 146, 147 India, 103 Inferno (Dante), 62–3 in-flight magazines, 140–1 Information ... for Travellers on the Continent of Europe (Starke), 41

302 Index Instructions for Forreine Travell (Howell), 38, 51 INSUD (Nuove Iniziative per il Sud), 143, 145 International Air Transport Association (IATA), 140 ipermercati (hypermarkets), 207 Iraq, 144 irredentism, Italian, 116 Isnenghi, Mario, 8 Isoardi, Lorenzo, 145 Istria, 125 Italia in miniatura theme park: and control mechanisms, 212; Garibaldi’s redshirt brigade at, 197, 198; mascot, Emme the extraterrestrial, 196, 200–1; narrative guides at, 197–200; overview of, 195, 196; visitors as giants at, 201–4, 203 Italian Journey (Goethe), 86 Italo-Turkish War, 115–16, 117 Italy, as nation state: and airline deregulation, 148; author’s arguments on, summarized, 23–5; and il bel paese topos, 63–4; Berlusconi as personifying, 184–5, 192–4; capital’s multiple moves, 47, 84, 96, 104; colonialism by, 7, 107–8, 116–17, 119–20, 125, 219–20; destination Italy as cohesive and stable vs., 6, 8, 31, 47, 59, 104, 128–9, 150–1; economic development of south, 54–7, 137, 142–3 (see also southern question); emigration from (see emigration from Italy); Fascist regime (see Fascist Italy); as fatta (made) and non fatta (not made), 8, 11, 55, 108, 214–15; Italia in miniatura’s simulation of, 195–204; labour reforms and

institutionalization of leisure, 129; Ministry of Tourism, 165, 253n30; modernization following Second World War, 59–60, 127–8, 135–9, 142; national history and identity as tied to tourism, 7, 16, 84, 88, 112–13, 216; national identity as politically pessimistic, 185, 200–1, 222n9; neoliberalism of, 26, 126, 218–19; origins and development of (see Unification of Italy); and postmodernism, 8–9, 11–12, 15–16, 108, 214–15, 218; substitution of imperium by emporium, 186–7; tourism as economic salvation for, 128; Turkey, war against, 115–16, 117; under Victor Emanuel II, 95–8 Italy, as touristic imaginary. See destination Italy Italy, simulations of. See simulacra of Italy, domestic; simulacra of Italy, global Italy for Dummies, 31, 49–50, 61 Italy from the Alps to Naples (Baedeker), 45 Italy: Handbook for Travellers (Baedeker), 46, 47 Itinerario istruttivo per trovare ... le magnificenze di Roma (Vasi), 39 Itinerarium Antonini, 33 Itinerarium Italiae (Schott), 38 Jackson, Kenneth T., 176, 177 Jameson, Frederic, 12, 15, 171 Japan, 166, 169, 254n41. See also Tokyo DisneySea Jaworski, Adam, 69 Jerusalem, 35 jet engines, advent of, 140–2, 141, 146

Index 303 Johanssen, Scarlett, 199 Johnson, Federico, 108–10 Jolly hotel chain, 248n36 Keysler, Johann Georg, 39 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 83, 99, 105, 197 Klotz, Heinrich, 155 Koshar, Rudy, 45 Kowinski, William, 205 Krautheimer, Richard, 35 Lacan, Jacques, 256n3 Lalande, Joseph-Jérôme de, 39 Larsen, Jonas, 68, 72, 76 Lasanky, D. Medina, 117 Lassels, Richard, 38, 87 Las Vegas: Dubai compared to, 170; and global popularity of Italian simulacra, 9, 17, 18, 215; Luxor ­hotel, 159, 213; statistics on tourists, 160–1; tradition and authenticity in, 18–19, 160–2, 215. See also Venetian Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas Las Vegas Sands Corporation, 214 Lazio, 207 Lega Nord (Northern League), 8 Leonardo da Vinci, 61 Leopardi, Giacomo, 9, 15, 97, 193 Letters from Italy (Starke), 40–1 Letters to a Friend, Containing ... Advices for Travel through France and Italy (Balfour), 38 Lever, Charles, 92, 241n29 Levi’s (brand), 208 Liberatori, Perla, 199 Libya, 107, 116, 119–20, 219–20 Liguria, 57, 85, 166, 169 Littlewood, Ian, 51

Livorno, 93, 102 Löfgren, Orvar, 130, 143 Lombardy, 83, 106, 178 London: Crystal Palace, 84, 89; EasyJet based in, 149; Fascist regime’s tourism offices in, 119; suburban developments near, 181; Times newspaper, 98, 242n44; travel to Continent from, 92, 93, 102, 103, 149 Lonely Planet guidebooks, 14, 60–1 Loren, Sophia, 60, 61 Los Angeles: Disneyland in, 17, 166 (see also Disneyland); Dubai compared to, 170; Westin Bonaventure Hotel, 18, 31, 209 low-cost carriers (LCCs), 24, 148–50 Lucca, 63 Lufthansa, 148, 150 Lusieri, Giovanni Battista, 40 Luxor, Las Vegas, 159, 213 Lyotard, Jean-François, 16–17 Macao, 17, 164–5, 214 MacCannell, Dean, 11, 73–4, 134 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 61, 193 MacMillan’s Guide to Italy, 45 mafia, 61, 250n57 Magenta, 94–5 Majorca, 140, 141 malls. See shopping malls Manzoni, Alessandro, 64, 236n52 Margherita, Queen, 109–10 Marin, Louis, 165 Marshall Plan, 142 Martyn, Thomas, 39 Marvin, Garry, 168 Marzotto, Gaetano, 248n36 mass tourism. See tourism industry, international

304 Index Mastroianni, Marcello, 59–60 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 83, 84, 95 Mazzoleni, Angelo, 55–6, 235n24 McDonald’s, 5, 10 Mediaset, 193 Mediterranean Harbor. See Tokyo DisneySea Melbourne, Australia, 215 Melfi, 199 Mercato shopping mall, Dubai: advertising materials, 174–5, 254n52; as architectural pastiche, 19, 171, 172, 173; and Dubai’s excesses, 170; Italianness as disguise for consumption at, 19–20, 171, 173–5, 205; Porto Vecchio Village, 173, 210; “slow consumption” not characteristic of, 207–8; Valdichiana Outlet Village compared to, 186 Mercurio Italiano (Raymond), 38 Mezzogiorno. See southern question Michelangelo, 61 Miedema, Nine, 36 Milan: autogrill near, 135; and Autostrada del Sole, 136; Berlusconi attack in, 184–5, 192–3; and Cook’s organized tours, 92, 102, 103; and Cook’s views on Catholicism, 96; duomo, 184–5, 187, 195, 200; Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, 202; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85; Montenapoleone fashion district, 190; and Mussolini’s death, 125; package tour operators in, 250n59; smog in, 127; as Touring Club Italiano’s base, 106, 108, 110, 120 Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Marvels of Rome), 32, 35–7

Misson, François Maximilien, 38 modernism vs. postmodernism, 225n39 Monk, Daniel Bertrand, 207 montage: in-flight magazines’ use of, 140; guidebooks’ use of, 31, 50; as method employed by author, 20–2; Piazza d’Italia as, 156; as postcard view, 52, 68, 75–7, 78, 79; Tokyo DisneySea as montage factory, 169 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 41 Montecatini Terme, 130 Monterosso, 177 Moore, Charles, 155–6, 157 Moriones, Saverio, 199 motels, 135, 137, 139, 248n36 Murray, John: collaboration and competition with Baedeker, 42–3, 44; handbooks, overview of, 43–4; and rise of guidebooks and destination Italy, 7, 32, 43, 46–7, 50; and Starke, 41, 42 Musée Grévin, Paris, 18 Mussolini, Benito, 117, 118–19, 121, 124, 125, 212 MyAir, 150 Naples: and Autostrada del Sole, 136; Benjamin on, 16; and Cook’s organized tours, 93, 98, 102, 103; cycling excursions to, 110; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85–6; postcard of street urchins, 54, 55; rubbish crisis, 11; vedute of, 70; work habits in, criticized, 56–7 Napoleon, 85, 94 neoliberalism: vs. colonialism, 158–9; and control mechanisms in tourism industry, 22, 25–6; defined,

Index 305 227n59; and de-personalization of production and consumption, 218; and excess consumption, 171, 175, 207; Fascist foreshadowing of, 217; globalization as underpinned by, 10, 187; and guidebooks, 23; of Italian state, 26, 126, 218–19; leisure as masking control mechanisms of, 175, 182 New Orleans: Piazza d’Italia, 155–6, 157, 171, 182–3, 209; simulations of French Quarter, 4, 17 New York City, 119, 215 Nike (brand), 19, 208, 210 Norman, Oklahoma, 17, 176 Nouveau Voyage d’Italie (Misson), 38 Nouvelles Frontières, 147 Nugent, Thomas, 39, 87 Oakland, California, 17 Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), 107, 111, 118, 120, 121–5, 124 Orientalism, 23, 53 Orizzonti, 250n59 Ostuni, 143 Otherness and the Other: and il dolce far niente trope, 57; and domestic order of Italian hyperreality, 25; at Italia in miniatura theme park, 196, 199–201; and souvenirs, 184–5, 189 outlet malls. See shopping malls package tours: and bus tour camaraderie, 134; and charter flights, 140, 146, 250n64; commodification of, 126, 128, 133, 145–6, 148, 150; Cook as leading first, in Italy, 84; Italian tour operators, rise of,

145–7, 250n59; to Rimini, 133, 142; shifting attitudes towards, 147–8; from United States in 1960s, 141–2; at villaggi turistici, 142, 143 Padua, 102 Paestum, 200 Palazzo, Las Vegas, 163, 213–14, 216 Palladian villas, 181 Palm Jumeirah, Dubai, 170 Pannini, Giovanni Paolo, 40, 69, 189 panorama, as postcard view, 52, 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 189 Pantheon, Rome, 76, 77 Papal States, 83, 94, 99 Paris, 16, 21, 92, 102 Parque España theme park, Japan, 254n41 Parsons, Nicholas, 32–3, 37, 40, 41 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 51 Pausanias, 32–4, 228n17 Pavarotti, Luciano, 61 Pegasus Airlines, 150 Periodos ges (Tour round the world), 32 Petrarch, Francesco, 62–3, 193 Philips, Deborah, 254n50 photography, 67, 71–2, 75, 76, 169, 180 Piacenza, 136 Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans, 155–6, 157, 171, 182–3, 209 piccole industrie (small industries): and built forms of Italian simulacra abroad, 157; destination Italy’s illusion of, 10; shopping malls’ association with, 19–20, 186, 210, 218; shopping malls’ displacement of, 207; structured work hours of, 209 Piedmont, 83, 85, 106, 115

306 Index pilgrimages, Christian, 6, 7, 32, 34–7, 229n26 pilgrimages, Greek, 34 Piozzi, Hester, 41 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 40, 69–71, 72, 188 Pisa, 62–3, 85, 88, 93, 102, 195 Pivato, Stefano, 137 Pliny the Elder, 32 Polynesia, 147 Pompeii, 16, 86, 94, 102 Popolo d’Italia (newspaper), 119 Popolo Italiano, Il (Mazzoleni), 55–6 Portofino, 166 postcards: author’s arguments on, summarized, 23, 52; as close-up view, 52, 68, 71–6, 74; guidebooks’ similarities to, 78, 80; invention of, 68, 69; of Italia in miniatura theme park, 201, 202; as montage, 52, 68, 75–7, 78, 79; of Neapolitan street urchins, 54, 55; as panorama view, 52, 68, 69–71, 72, 73, 189 postmodernism: disorienting nature of postmodern architecture, 31, 209–10, 214; of Dubai, 173; and guidebooks, 14–15, 31; and hyperreality of Italian simulacra, 17–20; and Italian state, 8–9, 11–12, 15–16, 108, 214–15, 218; and method of montage, 21–2; vs. modernism, 225n39; and pastiche, 171; of Piazza d’Italia, 155–6, 157, 182–3; of souvenirs, 188, 257n13; tourism as postmodern search for authenticity, 11; of Venice, 13 Prando, Francesco, 199 Preussag Group, 147 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 193

Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni), 64, 236n52 prostitutes and courtesans, 39, 87 Protestantism, 38, 55 Ptolemy, 32 Puglia, 142, 143, 195, 197 Qatar, 176 Raento, Pauliina, 164 railways: Cook’s coupon system, 88, 98, 99, 100, 104; as democratizing travel, 91; Fascist programs and discounts, 107, 122, 123 Rainbow Magic Land, 4–5, 25 Rambaldi, Ivo, 195 Ravenna, 195, 199 Raymond, John, 38 Renaissance: and architectural history of Europe, 18, 181; art, as Grand Tour attraction, 12; Christian pilgrimages to Rome during, 7, 36–7; and Fascist rewriting of history, 117–18; Mercato shopping mall’s evocation of, 174–5 Retail International, 171 Rex (cruise ship), 122 Rhodes, 107, 120, 219 Rick Steves’ Italy, 58–9 Rimini: Colonia Novarese, 122, 123; and homogenization of Mediterranean coast, 148; and Italia in miniatura theme park, 195; package tours to, 133, 142; rise of, as beach destination, 131–3, 132 Risorgimento. See Unification of Italy Riviera, 130–1, 166

Index 307 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Roman Holiday (film), 59, 141 Rome (city): as capital of Italy, 47, 84; Casilino 900 camp, 220; Ciampino airport, 141–2, 149; close-up postcards of, 71, 74; and Cook’s organized tours, 93, 98, 102, 103, 104; film representations of, 59, 141; French siege of (1849), 83; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85, 163; ipermercati (hypermarkets) in, 207; montage postcards of, 76, 77, 78, 79; Murray’s approach to, in guidebooks, 44; pilgrimages to, 7, 32, 34–7; Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma, 40, 69–70; souvenir shops in, 187, 188; Tokyo DisneySea’s simulation of, 17, 169; Touring Club Italiano excursions to, 109–10, 115; tourist crowds and traffic in, 29; and Valdichiana Outlet Village, 208; Via dei Condotti fashion district, 190. See also specific sites and attractions Rome, ancient (empire): and Einsidlensis, 35; fall of, 34; and Italo-Turkish War, 116; and Pausanias’s Description of Greece, 32–4; souvenirs symbolizing, 192; and suburbia’s Italian origins, 181; theme-park simulations of, 4–5, 25, 166. See also Colosseum, Roman; and other ancient sites Room with a View, A (Forster), 30 Rough Guide to Italy, The, 50 Rutherford, Ian, 34 RyanAir, 24, 149 Said, Edward, 22–3, 53 Saint Peter in Chains church, Rome, 35

Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, 29, 34, 36 Salerno, 110 Salò, Republic of, 5, 125 Salsomaggiore, 130 San Francisco, California, 177, 215 San Gimignano, 205 San Lorenzo in Damascus church, Rome, 35 San Remo, 130, 131 Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 35 Saponaro, Aldo, 127 Sardinia, 94, 113, 197, 207, 249n54 SARS epidemic, 149 Schott, François, 38 scientific positivism, 64 Scotland, 84, 88–9 Scottsdale, Arizona, 19, 205 Segreto, Luciano, 145–6 semiotics of tourism: destination Italy as floating signifier of itself, 17, 129, 156; destination Italy’s semiotic dominance over Italian state, 129, 151, 170, 185; Disneyland’s materialization of, 166; and nineteenth-century guidebook innovations, 41–2, 47; and souvenirs, 187–8, 257n13; tourism as act of collecting signs, 161 Seven Wonders of the World, 32 sexuality, 6, 39, 51, 60, 87 shopping malls: Borgata, Scottsdale, 19, 205; Catholic masses held in, 207; and Gruen transfer, 260n73; mal de mall, 205, 210–11; the Mall, Florence, 191; Mall of the Emirates, 170; Mercato, Dubai (see Mercato shopping mall, Dubai); rise of, in Italy, 207; rise of, in

308 Index United States, 204; Valdichiana Outlet Village, 186–7, 205–12, 218; Valmontone Fashion District, 3–5, 207 Sicily: cycling excursions to, 110; emigration from, 107; and Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand, 105, 115; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85; Italia in miniatura’s simulation of, 197; low-cost flights to, 150; outlet malls in, 207; and Touring Club Italiano guidebooks, 113. See also Kingdom of the Two Sicilies Siena, 177, 178, 202 sightseeing: under Fascism, 117; Grand Tour’s establishment of sightseeing canon, 12; MacCannell on, 11, 73; motorized flânerie, 68, 76, 78; vs. sight sensing, 52, 53, 67; as tourist gaze, 52, 68, 71–6, 117, 125; as travel glance, 52, 68, 76–7; as veduta, 52, 68, 69–71 Simpsons, The (television series), 199 simulacra of Italy, domestic: author’s arguments on, summarized, 25, 185–7; control mechanisms at, 186, 211–12; Italia in miniatura theme park as, 187, 195–204, 212; souvenirs as, 193–5; Valdichiana Outlet Village as, 186–7, 205–12, 218 simulacra of Italy, global: author’s arguments on, summarized, 25, 156–9, 217–18; control mechanisms at, 158, 163–5, 169, 177, 181–2; housing developments as, 17, 176–82, 255n59; hyperreality of, 17–20; Italian colonies as, 219–20; “Little Italy” neighbourhoods as, 215–16; Mediterranean Harbor at Tokyo DisneySea as, 17,

165–70 (see also Tokyo DisneySea); Mercato in Dubai as, 19–20, 170–5 (see also Mercato shopping mall, Dubai); Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans as, 155–6, 157, 171, 182–3, 209; profitability of, 166, 214; proliferation and popularity of, 6, 9–10, 17–19, 161, 215–16; Venetian casino-resorts as, 17, 159–65 (see also Venetian Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas) Sistine Chapel, Vatican, 29 SkyTeam, 148 Slovenia, 116 slow consumption, 186, 207–8, 210, 211, 218 socialism, 125–6, 129 Somalia, 107, 219 Soriero, Giuseppe, 144 Sorkin, Michael, 165–6 Sorrentino, Paolo, 214 Sorrento at Dublin Ranch, California: and conceptualizations of California, 177; control mechanisms at, 181–2; expansion of ­subdivision, 255n59; Italian ­signifiers, 178, 179; as leisure space, 178, 180–1; vs. other Italianate subdivisions, 176 South Africa, 147 southern question: and il dolce far niente trope, 54–7, 59, 62; and domestic tourism sector, 137, 142–3; postcards and guidebooks as artefacts of, 78; and Touring Club Italiano’s tourism campaign, 106, 110; U.S. subdivision names as reflecting north-south disparity, 178 Southwest Airlines, 148–9

Index 309 souvenirs: Berlusconi attacked with souvenir, 184–5, 192–3; clothing as, 189–92, 190; commodity excess of, 187, 188; Disney-branded Italian products, 168–9; of Grand Tour, 40, 69, 188–9; of Italia in miniatura theme park, 200, 201; as Italian simulacra, 193–5; paraphernalia of, as ubiquitous, 13–14; semiotics of, 187–8. See also postcards Soveria Mannelli, 105 Spain: Balearic Islands, 140, 141; in Dante’s writings, 236n44; and Parque España theme park, Japan, 254n41; Santiago de Compostela, 35; Torremolinos, 142, 147; in world tourism rankings, 7 Spanish Steps, Rome, 71, 76 Spedizione dei Mille (Expedition of the Thousand), 105–6, 107, 115, 197 Spinelli, Franco, 99 Staël, Madame de, 9 Star Alliance, 148 Starbucks (brand), 19, 173 Starke, Mariana, 40–2, 46 Steves, Rick, 58–9 Stewart, Susan, 184–5, 187, 202 Stoler, Ann, 158 Stoppani, Antonio, 63–4, 66, 68 Strabo, 32 street urchins (scugnizzi), 54, 55 suburbia: Arabian Desert version of, 175; and cars, 177, 208; history of, 176, 181; Italianate subdivisions, 17, 176–82, 255n59; malling of America, 204 suntan, as symbol of health and wealth, 131

Switzerland: Cook’s coupon system in, 99; Cook’s organized tours to, 92, 93; and Einsidlensis manuscript, 229n26; and German civil servant Zschokke, 235n24; and Italia in miniatura theme park, 195; and Mussolini’s death, 125; simulations of Swiss architecture, 4, 5 Tartaglia, Massimo, 184–5, 193 terrorist attacks of 11 September, 149, 204 theme parks: Fascist construction of theme-park environments, 117–18; Italia in miniatura, 187, 195–204, 212; simulations of ancient Rome at, 4–5, 25, 166; as symbolic respite from globalization, 20; as training grounds for international travel, 169, 254n41; Venice as resembling, 13. See also Disneyland; Tokyo DisneySea Thompson, Simon, 171 Thurlow, Crispin, 69 Times (London newspaper), 98, 242n44 Tintoretto, 161 Tiriolo, 137 Titian, 161 Tokyo Disneyland, 166 Tokyo DisneySea: and global popularity of Italian simulacra, 9, 17, 18, 215; and hyperreality of Disney, 165–6, 169–70, 215; Italian signifiers, 166, 167, 168; “slow consumption” not characteristic of, 208 Topshop (brand), 173 Torremolinos effect, 147

310 Index Touring Club Italiano (TCI): and Autostrada del Sole, 136–7; and il bel paese topos, 64–7; Bertarelli on unifying power of domestic tourism, 105–6, 110, 115; campaign to help Italians to know Italy, 24, 52, 64, 107–8, 111, 117; cycling excursions, 108–11, 109, 115; under Fascism, 118, 119, 120–1, 123, 217; and fiftieth anniversary of Risorgimento, 114–15; guidebooks, overview of, 111–14 (see also Guida d’Italia series); and Italian colonies and irredentist lands, 117–18; overview of touristic legacy, 106, 217; Le Vie d’Italia magazine, 120, 127, 136 tourism, defined, 223n18 tourism industry, international: Cook as founder of modern mass tourism, 7, 46, 85, 88, 91–2, 104, 217; as democratizing travel, 84, 91, 223n18; and family-run companies, 147; four S’s of modern tourism, 60; and invention of photography, 71; and low-cost carrier revolution, 24, 148–50; neoliberal control mechanisms in, 22, 25–6; and postmodern search for authenticity, 11; souvenir shops’ homogeneity, 257n13; statistics on size of, 6, 10, 221n4; theme parks as training grounds for, 169, 254n41; Torremolinos effect, 147; and transport technology advances, 91, 126; traveller’s cheque, predecessor to, 101, 103; world tourism rankings, 7, 215 tourism in Italy, domestic: and automobile-related infrastructure,

135–9; Bertarelli on unifying power of, 105–6, 110, 115; and colonial expansion, 107–8, 117–18, 119–20; Cook’s promotion of, 84, 98–9, 103; under Fascism, 24, 107–8, 117–26, 129–30, 217; and Italia in miniatura theme park, 195–204; Italian package tour operators, rise of, 145–7, 250n59; at Rainbow Magic Land, 4–5, 25; Rimini’s rise as beach destination, 131–3, 132; souvenirs targeting, 192–3; three categories of, 130; Touring Club Italiano’s campaign to help Italians to know Italy, 24, 52, 64, 107–8, 111, 117; Touring Club Italiano’s cycling excursions, 108–11, 109, 115; and Touring Club Italiano’s guidebooks, 111–14; and traditional travel holidays, 8; at Valdichiana Outlet Village, 207; villaggi turistici as defining, 142–4 tourism in Italy, economics of: and Chinese tourists, 165; and Cook’s coupon system, 99, 102–4; and domestic package tours, 145–7; and Fascist discounts, 122–3; human and environmental costs, 10–11; and low-cost carrier revolution, 148; in Mezzogiorno (southern regions), 137, 142–3; statistics on scope of international tourism, 7–8, 11; tourism as economic salvation of Italian state, 128; and transport technology advances, 126, 135–7, 139, 141–2; Trevi Fountain’s revenue, 29; and villaggi turistici development, 142–4, 250n57 tourism in Italy, history of: air travel, advances in, 139–42, 146; air

Index 311 travel, low-cost carrier revolution in, 148–50; automobile-related infrastructure, development of, 135–9; bus tours, post-war, 133–4; Christian pilgrimages to Rome, 6, 7, 32, 34–7, 229n26; Cook’s organized Italian tours, 84, 87–8, 92–3, 97–104, 106; as enduring over centuries, 6, 7, 30; Fascist programs and excursions, 121–5, 129–30; Grand Tour, overview of, 37, 85–7; Italian package tour operators, rise of, 145–7, 250n59; Riviera summer vacations, rise of, 130–1; Touring Club Italiano excursions, 108–11, 115; villaggi turistici, development of, 142–4 tourism in Italy, international (present-day): from China, 165, 253n30; from Japan, 169; and low-cost carrier revolution, 24, 148–50; statistics on scope of, 7–8, 11 Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, The (MacCannell), 11 tourist gaze, 52, 68, 71–6, 117, 125 tradition and authenticity: and bus tours of 1950s, 134; destination Italy as locus of, 6, 10–11, 22, 215; and Fascist rewriting of history, 117–18; guidebook representations of, 50; and Italy as land of leisure, 52, 57; in Las Vegas, 18–19, 160–2; in Mercato shopping mall, Dubai, 19–20, 171, 173–4; in Valdichiana Outlet Village, 186, 207, 209–10 trains. See railways Trajan, Emperor, 35 transportation technology. See air travel; automobiles; railways Trastevere, 36

travel films, 224n28 travel glance, 52, 68, 76–7 travel writing, 31, 41 Travels on the Continent (Starke), 40–1, 42 Travels through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain (Keysler), 39 Trevi Fountain, Rome, 29, 59, 71, 76 Tripoli, 116, 219–20 Turin: and Alpitour excursions to Nice, 145; and Cook’s organized tours, 88, 93, 98, 102, 103; Cook’s praise of, 96–7; as Fiat’s headquarters, 148; as former capital, 47, 84, 96; world fair in, 115 Turisanda, 250n59 Turkey, 33, 115, 150 Tuscany: Borgata shopping mall’s simulation of, 205; in Dante’s Inferno, 62–3; Fascist refurbishing of hill towns, 10; Guida d’Italia book on, 66–7; housing developments’ simulation of, 17, 176; Mercato shopping mall’s simulation of, 19, 173, 174–5; and mid-nineteenth-century power struggles, 83; resorts in grand hotel era, 130; Tokyo DisneySea’s simulation of, 166, 167; Valdichiana Outlet Village’s simulation of, 186–7, 205–12, 218 Tutto a €1 (All for €1) stores, 207 uncanny, the, 200–1 Unification of Italy (Risorgimento): and arrival of mass tourism, 7, 84, 88, 93–104, 217; Bertarelli on unifying power of domestic tourism, 105–6, 110, 115; Cook’s

312 Index support for, 84, 88, 93–9, 107; fiftieth-anniversary celebrations, 114–15; guidebooks published during, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50; and Italia in miniatura theme park, 197, 198, 201; and Italian colonies and irredentist lands, 117–18; and Italy as weak and fractured, 6, 8, 214; and Italy’s form vs. content, 9; literary canon of, 236n52; monetary challenges of, 99; and panoramas, 68; and Stoppani’s Il Bel Paese, 66; Touring Club Italiano tours in honour of, 107, 115; wars and battles preceding, 83, 94–5, 104, 105, 197. See also southern question United Kingdom: bus tourists from, 134; and charter flights, 139, 140, 248n39; Cook’s coupon system in, 99, 102; Cook’s domestic tours in, 84, 88–90; Cook’s Italian tours, British travellers on, 88, 92–3, 98–9, 103; French Riviera, tourists to, 130; Grand Tourists from, 37, 85–7; guidebook authors from, 38–9, 41–4, 51; industriousness of Britons vs. Italians, 55; Italian unification, British support of, 84, 94; labour reforms in, 129; and low-cost carrier airlines, 24, 148, 149; Palladian-inspired architecture in, 181; Spain, tourists to, 140, 141. See also London United States: air travel to Italy from, in 1960s, 141–2; Americans with Disabilities Act, 162; Bush presidencies, 194; Grand Tourists from, 87; Interstate Highway System, 136; and low-cost carrier revolution, 148; and suburbia,

176; terrorist attacks, 149, 204; in world tourism rankings, 7. See also California; and specific cities UpClose Italy, 58 Urry, John, 68, 71, 151 Val d’Aosta, 130 Valdichiana Outlet Village: Blackstone Group’s purchase of, 260n69; control mechanisms at, 211–12; hyperreality of, as paradoxical, 208, 210–11; and imperial formations, 186–7; overview of, 205, 206; Tuscanness as disguise for consumption at, 186, 207, 209–10, 218 Valli, Carlo, 199 Valmontone Fashion District, 3–5, 207 Valtur, 143, 144, 145, 146, 250n57 Van Wittel (Vanvitelli), Gaspar, 69, 189 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 32 Vasari, Giorgio, 209 Vasi, Giuseppe, 39 Vatican, 29, 36, 58 veduta (panorama), 52, 68, 69–71 Vedute di Roma (Piranesi), 40, 69–70, 72, 188 vedutismo (landscape painting), 23, 52, 69–71 Venetian Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas: authentic fakery at, 160–2, 173, 214; brochures and resort guide, 162–3; control mechanisms at, 163–5; and global popularity of Italian simulacra, 9, 17, 18; monumental signifiers, 159, 160; Palazzo expansion, 163, 213–14; Valdichiana Outlet Village compared to, 209

Index 313 Venetian Hotel and Casino, Macao, 17, 164–5, 214 Veneto, 83, 181 Venice: and Cook’s organized tours, 97–8, 102, 103, 104; courtesans in, 39, 87; and Grand Tour itineraries, 85, 163; housing developments’ simulation of, 176; Lido, 131; Mercato shopping mall’s simulation of, 19, 171, 173, 174–5, 205; Murano glassmaking, 161, 187; as postmodern city, 13; Tokyo DisneySea’s simulation of, 167, 168; Touring Club Italiano excursion to, 115; and vedutismo, 69; Venetian casino-resorts’ popularity and size vs., 17; Venetian casino-resorts’ simulation of, 159–65, 213–14 Verdi, Giuseppe, 61 Verona, 177 Veronese, 161 Vespas, 58, 169 Vesuvius, Mount, 70, 86 Viaggi dell’Elefante, 250n59 Viaggi del Ventaglio, 250n59, 250n66 Viareggio, 130 Vibo Valentia, 137 Victor Emanuel II, King, 95–8 video recorders, 67, 76 Vie d’Italia, Le (magazine), 120, 127, 136 villaggi turistici (holiday villages or resorts): Alpitour’s construction of, 146; and boom economico, 128; and car-owning tourists, 24; as

defining domestic tourism, 142–4; and low-cost carrier revolution, 147–8, 150; motel development compared to, 137 Villari, Pasquale, 56–7 villeggiatura (holiday making), 137, 142 Virilio, Paul, 77, 186, 256n6 Volare Airlines, 150 Volkmann, Johann Jacob, 39–40 Vota, Giuseppe, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 120 Voyage d’un François en Italie (Lalande), 39 Voyage of Italy, The (Lassels), 38, 87 Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 18, 31, 209 Williams, Robin, 199 Windjet, 150 Withey, Lynne, 89, 93 Wizz Air, 150 Woodd, Charles H.L., 98–9, 242n44 world fair, 115 World War, First, 115–16, 117, 119 World War, Second: charter flights following, 139, 248n39; Italian government turnovers following, 150; Italian modernization following, 59–60, 127–8, 135–7, 142; Italian poverty and suffering following, 66, 78, 125–6; soldiers returning to Italy as tourists, 132, 141 Zschokke, Heinrich, 56, 235n24