From the Grand Tour to mass tourism. Itineraries between aesthetics and society

edited by Leonardo Distaso e Imma De Pascale

Tourism is among the social phenomena that critical thinking is called upon to investigate with some urgency. There is no doubt by now that it has an impact on the daily lives of individuals, on the socioeconomic performance of communities, and thus on the livability and sustainability of art cities themselves, as well as landscape sites and leisure resorts. An aesthetic investigation of tourism or, in the words of Marco D'Eramo, "on the age of tourism" means fulfilling the difficult task of being contemporary in order to understand the metamorphosis that the aforementioned phenomenon is bringing to lifestyles.

Indeed, it seems that contemporary tourism is linked to aspects no longer or not only concerning the cultural enrichment that was typical of the Grand Tour taken between the 16th and 19th centuries, in which the traveler did not consider himself merely a tourist, but was a wayfarer culturally involved in the places he visited. The Grand Tour played a role in the cultural formation of the aristocracy and later of the European upper middle class, an elite who enjoyed the privilege of time freed from work and economic availability that allowed them to study languages and assimilate the culture of the place while, at the same time, contributing to the definition of their own identity in relation to different realities. Mass tourism, born in the 19th century and carried to the extreme consequences of our days requires a reflection as much on the behaviors proper to capitalistic societies, as on the processes of aesthetization of the world starting from a rethinking of time freed from work and the standardization of taste, immersed in a dimension of consumism that totalizes the experiences of the individual-mass. As a social phenomenon, tourism cannot be separated from forms of capitalism as it is among the most important industries of our time, an industry that produces economic capital by exploiting cultural capital or symbolic capital, as Bourdieu puts it. On the one hand, mass tourism has turned cultural assets into goods; on the other hand, it has given rise to the commodification of primary goods declined in the form of aesthetic experiences, from living to eating. Contemporary cities around the world increasingly take on the physiognomy of a theme amusement park involving the local traditions in which the cultural travel component is diminished in favor of the experiential tour.

We should ask what are the needs that move the masses of tourists and how much the demand for tourism depends on the necessity of an escape from daily life to which the culture industry provides relief. Moving within the cultural horizon of Adorno and Horkheimer, we can say that tourism also falls within the cultural industry that acts by indulging the needs that capitalism imposes in the dynamics of alienation that it produces in society. Starting from an investigation of social aesthetics, this call for papers intends to rethink mass tourism in its relation to aesthetic experience.

Key-words

- Tourism and cultural assets

- Mass tourism and the cultural industry

- Tourism and standardization of taste

- Tourism and the aesthetization of the world

- Politics and aesthetics of tourism

- Gastronomic and eno-gastronomic tourism

Deadline for submitting proposals: December 15, 2024 (leonardo.distaso@unina.it)

Notification of acceptance or refusal of the proposal after the peer review process: February 1, 2025.

Deadline for submitting the final article (after the potential revisions required by the reviewers): March 7, 2025.