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Abstract
This article examines the role of tourism in re-imagining the Venetian heritage of Istria and Dalmatia to cast the eastern Adriatic coastlands as Italian. It explores the development of eastern Adriatic tourism from the 1880s to 1930s, in the Habsburg monarchy and then the Italian state, with attention to the cultural factors associated with the medieval Republic of Venice and ethno-nationalist politics that shaped claims to Adriatic territory. Under the western tourist's gaze, remnants of Venetian architecture and culture associated with the mythologized ‘Most Serene Republic’ and ‘Queen of the Adriatic’ became the basis for casting the coastal environment as a pleasing, civilized Italian environment in contrast to the rocky, wild, and primitive Slavic and Balkan inlands. The article argues that Italian irredentist, nationalist, and Fascist efforts to tie the Istrian and Dalmatian coasts to medieval Venice, cast as a stepping stone on the path of continuous Italian control from Ancient Rome to the modern state, could not successfully ascribe Italianness to the coastland nor could the Adriatic Sea be accepted as Italian. For tourists, the eastern coastlands retained a multi-ethnic maritime flavor reflective of the variety of peoples that inhabited Adriatic shores.
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Notes on contributor
Maura Hametz is a professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. Her research examines Trieste and the northeastern Adriatic regions since the late nineteenth century with emphasis on the intersections of politics, culture, economy, law, religion, and ethnic and national identity. Her most recent study In the Name of Italy (Fordham U. Press, 2012) explores nationalist naming in the Adriatic and the judicial system and justice in Fascist Italy.
Notes
1 Edward Freeman, Sketches from the Subject and Neighbour Lands of Venice (London: Macmillan, 1881), 287. The ‘winged lion's marble piles’ is from Lord Byron's ‘Childe Harold’. Hadriatic, an alternate spelling of Adriatic with classical roots in Roman and Greek references, appears frequently in nineteenth-century sources.
2 Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 50–1.
3 Freeman, Sketches, 89, 97.
4 Freeman, Sketches, 89, 85.
5 Sources examined for this article include western travelogs focused on art and architecture rather than such popular guides as Cook's or Baedeker's offering practical travel advice. In keeping with the tone of the sources that emphasize ties to western civilization, place names remain in English or Italian. Slovene, Croatian, and/or German names are listed at first mention.
6 See Pieter Judson, ‘Marking National Space on the Habsburg Austrian Borderlands, 1880–1918’, in Shatterzone of Empires, eds. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 130–1.
7 Andi Mihalache, ‘Metaphor and Monumentality: The Travels of Nicolae Iorga’, in Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, eds. Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis (Budapest: CEU Press, 2008), 237.
8 Margaret Plant, Venice, Fragile City, 1797–1997 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 226.
9 John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 15–6, 26–7.
10 Plant, Fragile City, 226.
11 Jill Steward, ‘The Development of Tourist Culture and the Formation of Social and Cultural Identities 1800–1914, With Particular Reference to Central Europe’ (PhD diss., University of Northumbria, 2008), 83, 102.
12 Harry Thomas, Memory Lane: Volume I (Denbighshire: Gwasg Helygain, 2003), 25. The author would like to thank John Walton for alerting her to this ‘Venice’ in Wales.
13 Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
14 Crouzet-Pavan, Venice Triumphant, 55, 86–7, 184–91; Bruce Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 62–3.
15 Plant, Fragile City, 226–7.
16 Frederick Hamilton Jackson, The Shores of the Adriatic: The Austrian Side: The Küstenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia (London: John Murray, 1908), 281. The John Murray imprint marked this guide as an authoritative text for discerning British travelers.
17 Maude Holbach, Dalmatia: The Land Where East Meets West (London: John Lane, 1910), 139, 170.
18 Steward, ‘Tourist Culture’, 169, 222.
19 Daniel Knudsen et al., ‘Landscape, Tourism and Meaning: An Introduction’, in Landscape, Tourism and Meaning, eds. Daniel Knudsen et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 1.
20 Sean Huff, ‘Identity and Landscape: The Reification of Place in Strasbourg, France’, in Landscape, Tourism and Meaning, eds. Daniel Knudsen et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 35.
21 On Adriatic multi-nationalism, Dominique Reill, Nationalists Who Feared the Nation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
22 Freeman, Sketches, 125–6.
23 See John K. Walton, ‘Introduction’, in Histories of Tourism: Representation, Identity and Conflict, eds. John K. Walton (Clevedon: Channel View Publications, 2005), 7.
24 On the ‘naturalization of [these] relationships’, see Steward, ‘Tourist Culture’, 14.
25 On politics and Italian ethnicity in Habsburg Dalmatia see, Luciano Monzali, Italiani di Dalmazia: dal Risorgimento alla Grande Guerra (Florence: Le lettere, 2004).
26 Jackson, Shores of the Adriatic, vi, 211.
27 Handbook of Dalmatia: Abbazia, Lussin, etc. ‘The Austrian Riviera’ Including the Albanian Coast, The Jonian Islands, Corfu, Patras, Athens (Vienna: A. Hartleben, 1913), 3–4.
28 Pamela Ballinger, ‘Liquid Borderland, Inelastic Sea?’, in Shatterzone of Empires, eds. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013) 425, examines efforts to map the Adriatic as a national space.
29 Jackson, Shores of the Adriatic, 398–403, 407.
30 Arthur Lincoln Frothingham, Roman Cities in Italy and Dalmatia (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910), xix, 264, 269, 289.
31 Religious understandings, politics, and identity associated with Latin Christendom and Catholicism in the eastern Adriatic offer another line for inquiry with respect to ethnic relations and Italian presence in the eastern Adriatic, but they fall outside the scope of this article.
32 Freeman, Sketches, 191–2, 271.
33 Eric Zuelow, ‘The Necessity of Touring Beyond the Nation: An Introduction’, in Touring Beyond the Nation: A Transnational Approach to European Tourism History, ed. Eric Zuelow (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 11.
34 In this respect, Italians more closely resembled Hungarians (who could rely on Magyar crown lands) than Croats, Slovenes, or Czechs. Judson, ‘Marking National Space’, 131.
35 Handbook of Dalmatia, 3–4.
36 Pieter Judson, ‘“Every German Visitor Has a Völkisch Obligation He Must Fulfill”: Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880–1918’, in Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 149, 152–6.
37 Steward, ‘Tourist Culture’, 175, 225.
38 On landscape ‘clues’, see Knudsen et al., ‘An Introduction’, 5.
39 John Mason Neale, Notes, Ecclesiological and Picturesque, on Dalmatia, Croatia, Istria, Styria (London: Hayes, 1861), 68, 114.
40 Holbach, Dalmatia, facing 234.
41 Jackson, Shores of the Adriatic, 25, 265, 319. The label ‘Venetian Gothic’ reflected western prejudice. The style mixed Gothic, Renaissance, Byzantine and Moorish elements.
42 Holbach, Dalmatia, 33, 62–3, 115, 194, 196.
43 Marco Tamaro, Le città e le castella dell'Istria (Parenzo: Gaetano Coana, 1892), iv, xii–xiii.
44 On Yriarte and the debate spurred by his work see, Kristjan Knez, ‘L'Istria nel viaggio di Charles Yriarte’, Quaderni (Centro di ricerche storiche – Rovigno) 21 (2010): 7–46.
45 Tamaro, Le città e le castella, v–vi.
46 Holbach, Dalmatia, 56.
47 Jackson, Shores of the Adriatic, 262.
48 Jackson, Shores of the Adriatic, 7.
49 Holbach, Dalmatia, 43.
50 Handbook of Dalmatia, iii.
51 Holbach, Dalmatia, 17.
52 Holbach, Dalmatia, 27.
53 Steward, ‘Tourist Culture’, 130–1, 134–5.
54 Holbach, Dalmatia, 28.
55 Attilio Tamaro, L'Adriatico golfo d'Italia (Milan: Treves, 1915), 126–7, 193–4.
56 Trieste, Biblioteca Civica, Archivio Diplomatico, RP, MS Misc. I/142, (Attilio Tamaro), Nicoletti (Sebenico) to Attilio Tamaro, 14 January 1921; Attilio Tamaro, La Dalmazia: sua italianità, suo valore per la libertà d'Italia nell'Adriatico (Genoa: Formíggini, 1915), v.
57 Tomaso Sillani, ‘La Dalmazia Monumentale’, in La Dalmazia Monumentale, eds. Adolfo Venturi, Ettore Pais, and Pompeo Molmenti (Milan: Alfieri & LaCroix, 1917), 7–8, 15.
58 Pompeo Molmenti, ‘La Serenissima in Dalmazia’ in La Dalmazia Monumentale, eds. Adolfo Venturi, Ettore Pais, and Pompeo Molmenti (Milan: Alfieri & LaCroix, 1917) 49.
59 On efforts to create national spaces through tourism in Central Europe, see Richard Wolfel, ‘Slicing the Dobish Torte: The Three Layers of Tourism in Munich’, in Landscape, Tourism and Meaning, eds. Daniel Knudsen et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) 65.
60 Adriacus [pseud.], From Trieste to Valona: The Adriatic Problem and Italy's Aspirations (Milan: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1919), 12–3.
61 Tamaro, La Dalmazia, 10.
62 John Foster Bass, The Peace Tangle (New York: Macmillan Company, 1921), 286.
63 Richard J. B. Bosworth, ‘Tourist Planning in Fascist Italy and the Limits of a Totalitarian Culture’, Contemporary European History 6, no. 1 (1997): 3–4.
64 Charles Burdett, Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 11, 17.
65 Charles Burdett, Journeys Through Fascism: Italian Travel Writing Between the Wars (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 11, 44.
66 David Atkinson and Denis Cosgrove, ‘Urban Rhetoric and Embodied Identities: City, Nation, and Empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II Monument in Rome, 1870–1945’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88, no. 1 (1998): 37–39; and Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 77, 90–100.
67 Luigi Ugolini, L'antica Albania, nelle ricerche archeologiche italiane (Rome: Sindacato Italiano Arti Grafiche, 1927), 83–6.
68 Bosworth, ‘Tourist planning’, 8–10.
69 Trieste, Riviera d'Istria, Zara (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1927), 27, 30, 35, 40, 75, 76.
70 Bosworth, ‘Tourist planning’, 12–3.
71 Ente nazionale industrie turistiche, Health Resorts, Seaside and Watering Places in Italy (Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, [1931]), 32–40.
72 Sergio Vatta, Sul Mare: Grafica pubblicitaria ed editoriale attraverso le copertine della rivista di viaggi del Lloyd Triestino (Trieste: Lint, 2000) reproduces all of the cover images.
73 G. A. Perco and Sergio Gradenigo, Postumia e le sue celebri grotte (Milan: Calamandrei, 1940), 65–72.
74 Andrea Benedetti, ‘Postumia’, La porta orientale 1, no. 2 (1931): 114–5.
75 ‘Commissione Grotte Eugenio Boegan: Giovanni Andrea Perko (1876–1914)’, http://www.boegan.it/la-nostra-storia/speleologi-del-passato/cognomi-p-z/giovanni-andrea-perko/?no_cache = 1&sword_list%5B%5D = Perko. A subject of the polyglot monarchy, Perco was born in eastern Istria, schooled in German, and published most of his works (including those written under the Habsburgs) in Italian. The spelling of his name varies in the sources.
76 Perco and Gradenigo, Postumia, 85–6.
77 Sperato Zanetti, ‘Il movimento turistico nelle stazioni balneari della Venezia Giulia’, La porta orientale 3, no. 1 (1933): 72.
78 On the Fascist Dopolavoro and tourism, see Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 180–4.
79 Paul Baxa, ‘“Il Nostro Duce”: Mussolini's Visit to Trieste in 1938 and the Workings of the Cult of the Duce’, Modern Italy 18, no. 2 (2013): 117–28.
80 Paul Baxa, ‘“Il Nostro Duce”: Mussolini's Visit to Trieste in 1938 and the Workings of the Cult of the Duce’, Modern Italy 18, 13–30.
81 See Attilio Degrassi, ‘Le grotte carsiche nell'età romana’, Le grotte d'Italia [Grottoes of Italy] 3, no. 4 (1929): 161–82.
82 Perco and Gradenigo, Postumia, 29.
83 Trieste, Biblioteca Civica, Archivio Diplomatico, RP, MS Misc. I/142, (Attilio Tamaro), Attilio Tamaro to Tomaso Sillani, 28 April 1931.
84 Louis Voynovitch, A Historical Saunter Through Dubrovnik (Ragusa) (Dubrovnik: Jadran, 1929), 9, 21, 66.
85 Daniel Knudsen et al., ‘Landscape, Tourism and Meaning: A Conclusion’, in Landscape, Tourism and Meaning, ed. Knudsen et al., 133.
86 ‘Sea Cities’, Viaggi in Italia 5, no. 9 (July 1937): 18–20.
87 ‘Venezia’, Viaggi in Italia 5, no. 6 (April 1937): 6–7.
88 ‘In Italy's glorious Sunshine’, Viaggi in Italia 4, no. 10 (August 1936): 14–17.
89 ‘By Rail along the Adriatic Coast’, Viaggi in Italia 4, no. 3 (January 1936): 22–23.
90 ‘Abbazia’, Viaggi in Italia 4, no. 5 (March 1936): 14–15; and ‘Abbazia’, Viaggi in Italia 6, no. 10 (August 1938): 8–9.
91 ‘From the beaches of Julian Venetia to the shores of Romagna’, Viaggi in Italia 5, no. 10 (August 1937): 2–7.
92 ‘Venetia's Gems’, Viaggi in Italia 4, special edition (June 1936): 24–26; ‘Abbazia’ (1936), 14–15; and ‘Lights on the Coasts of Istria’, Viaggi in Italia 6, no. 11 (November 1938): 36.
93 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 1941, http://www.theatlantic.com/rebecca-west/, especially Part III.
94 Eleanor Mercein, ‘Slava’ in Sounding Harbors (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935), 5, 13.
95 Zuelow, ‘Introduction’, 4.
96 Bosworth, ‘Tourist planning’, 25.
97 Franco Ciarlantini, Viaggio nell'Oriente Mediterraneo (Milan: Mondadori, 1935), 162.