From the Tourist’s Gaze: Holiday Home Movies as Vernacular Sources for the Ecocritical Thought

From the Tourist’s Gaze bridges environmental humanities and amateur cinema studies, exploring tourism-induced environmental issues through the visual representations created by tourists themselves. The protagonists of the book are families from Nort-West Italy and their holiday films, captured during their holidays in the Ligurian Riviera. The timeframe spans between the 1950s and 1970s, the so-called Italian “economic miracle”, a period in which Italy experienced an extraordinary and rapid economic growth and, consequentially, a rise in living standards, including tourism and film cameras’ accessibility. Radical environmental transformations such as the industrialization and cementing of spaces, or the conversion of entire coastlines into territories equipped to receive masses of tourists, were just one of the consequences, studied from a myriad of sources, but never through amateur films. The most illustrative case is the Ligurian Riviera, which has been regarded as an example of land consumption since those contemporary years. Despite being centered on a specific case study, readers will be equipped with practical tools to enhance their study of historical amateur films. These tools are introduced through innovative methodological approaches to archival research and visual analysis. The results will highlight the visual imagery of mid-20th-century tourists and their perspectives on the destinations they visited, offering fresh, visually oriented insights that contribute to the field of tourism studies. As a visual journey through mid-20th-century Italian tourism and its environmental narratives, it may interest cultural geographers, tourism and media scholars, and the broader group of environmental humanists: the latter will have the opportunity to explore amateur cinema as an untapped resource for understanding cultural narratives, while amateur cinema scholars will have an example of a fresh and different approach to their subject. It can also give new insights to archivists specialized in home movies and be appealing to scholars and intellectuals interested in these topics.