Destination Italy: Tourism, colonialism, and the modern Italian nation-state, 1861--1947

This dissertation demonstrates that modern mass tourism was a key discourse that created a set of representational and economic practices critical to the making of modern Italy. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Italy's history as a nation-state has been characterized by belatedness, regional fragmentation, and political instability. Both foreign and Italian tourists, however, encountered a culturally unified nation with a heritage of imperial grandeur and artistic patrimony. My dissertation combines historical, literary, and anthropological methodologies to show that tourism allowed for an imagined community powerful enough to overcome modern Italy's fragmented political identity.;Part I explores how the political rhetoric of the Risorgimento---Italy's national unification movement in the mid-nineteenth century---paradoxically celebrated and refused the nation-state. At odds are the rhetoric of poiesis, which insists that Italy is something to be made, and the rhetoric of negation, which maintains that Italy can never exist given its regional, social, and linguistic differentiation. Chapter 1 clarifies the origin of a phrase that has been central to Italy's nation-making project: "With Italy made, [we] must now make the Italians." The phrase is often attributed to senator Massimo D'Azeglio circa 1866, but recent scholarship has implied that he never uttered it in that form. I trace the permutations of the phrase through the publication history of D'Azeglio's Ricordi, its resurfacing in the writings of Ferdinando Martini at the fin-de-siecle, and finally its re-appropriation by Gabriele D'Annunzio and the fascist government in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 2 shows that by the late nineteenth century Italy becomes framed in terms of decline and decadence; it is no longer a nation of growth, progress, and expansion, but rather one defined by difference and backwardness. I reveal how semantic shifts in concepts such as "patria" and "nation" from the late Renaissance through the Risorgimento evolved into the rhetoric of negation, which continues to punctuate contemporary political debates about modern Italy.;Part II shows how the practices of mass tourism in the nineteenth century by foreigners and Italians alike conditioned a cohesive imagined community that challenged the unstable political conceptions of the nation-state. Chapter 3 details the arrival of modern mass tourism on the Italian peninsula in 1864. It first considers the forms of proto-tourism---pilgrimage, commerce, and the Grand Tour---that foreshadowed the itineraries and practices of later "mass tourists." The last half of the chapter explores the role of British tour operator Thomas Cook in establishing a tourism industry in Italy, and consequently, how Cook and his tourists encouraged and accelerated Italian national unification. Chapter 4 explores the development of an organized Italian domestic tourism industry, beginning in 1894 with the founding of the Touring Club Italiano (TCI). I show how the patriotic aims of the TCI laid the foundation for the state organization of tourism circa 1920 and eventually, its manipulation by Mussolini's regime to advance fascist agendas.;In Part III, I explore the transition from nation to empire with Italian tourists traveling to their colonies in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly to Rhodes and Libya. Here, Italian tourists encountered an incongruous "Italy": one that was simultaneously their own modern, powerful, fascist nation-state and an exotic, primitive, unconquerable Other. I find that tourism conditioned Italy's imperialist project, and in each site, it presaged the transnational flows of globalization. Chapter 5 details the development of the Italian tourism industry on Rhodes, the capital of Dodecanese Islands, and specifies the representations and practices that constructed an "Italian Rhodes." It shows how the idea of "mare nostrum" and its link to former empires---Rome, Venice, and Christianity---shaped Italy's imperial attitude. Similarly, Chapter 6 explores the representations, and to some extent, the practices of Italian colonial tourism in Libya. Libya was the locus for Italian imperialism, which was simultaneously oriented toward the past, ancient Rome, and the future, Mussolini's fascist Empire. Tourists perpetuated the syncretisms inherent in colonial rule, bringing the colony home with their postcards and narratives. At the same time, these tourists embedded "Italy" into a system of cultural flows and asymmetries of power characteristic of a new global order, or, another form of "Empire.".