BREVI CENNI SUL RAPPORTO TRA TURISMO E LETTERATURA ITALIANA

Brief notes on the relationship between tourism and Italian literature. Using literary sources, the essay covers three points in the relationship between Italians and holidays: the first is the transition from vacation to tourism; the second from summer vacation as a moment of rest (mainly in the countryside) to vacation as an opportunity for fun (mostly at the seaside). In addition to these two, we have a third point: in the second half of the Twentieth century, holidays become a mass phenomenon, no longer elitist as they had been until the first half of the same century. They become something possible for most Italians who, especially in August, leave the cities empty. This historical-sociological parable is revisited through literary testimonies that go back to the roots of the mother literature, the Latin one and then it resumes its path, interrupted in the High Middle Ages, around 1300 in conjunction with the first literary testimonies (the triad Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio). The vacation phenomenon, intended as staying for the summer months in a villa more or less outside the city walls, finds its maximum expression starting from the 16th century with the Renaissance villas of the aristocracy, until it meets the aspirations of the small nobility and of the upper middle class in the 18th and 19th centuries. Crucial testimony is Carlo Goldoni's “Vacation Trilogy”, a triptych of three comedies that actually constitute a single text portraying the vacation phenomenon as a status symbol far from the motivations of previous centuries (vacation as a moment of peace, ‘’otium’’, rest). During the Nineteenth century, holidays are associated with tourism (especially in the thermal baths and in the mountains), while from the Twentieth century, the favourite option is the seaside. However, another change will characterize the use of leisure in the Twentieth century: the birth of mass tourism. With brief literary notes, we try to explain how in Italy holidays have now turned into something with anxiety-inducing traits, especially among young people and not only, in an almost spasmodic search for fun (with Dionysian and Bacchic traits) at the expense of original motivations (rest, leisure, “otium”) in a relationship in which the “horror vacui” seems to have ousted the “horror pleni”.