Search results

International tourists traveling the eastern Adriatic are sometimes perplexed when some guides describe a Venetian bell tower, a Byzantine church, or Roman ruins as solely Croatian or Slovenian cultural heritage. If the same guides would then reveal that Marco Polo should be spelled Marko Polo for his Croatian origins, their perplexities would probably grow stronger. Most of the time, the same tourists are unaware that the Austrian Navy kept the codes and the tradition of the Serenissima Republic of Venice. Actually, until the Empire split in 1867, it was named Österreich-Venizianische Marine (Austro-Venetian Navy). Interestingly, according to the legend, the Austrian Admiral von Tegheltoff (German speaking subject of the Empire, born in the Alpine town of Maribor-Marburg, currently in Slovenia) after the famous victory in the battle of Lissa in 1866 hailed “Viva San Marco!” The Austrian victory against the fleet of the Kingdom of Italy was surprising and it has become a legendary one both in a good and bad sense. Accordingly, it has been later romanticized in different ways and strategically imbued with moral values by diverse actors. For instance, the journal of Admiral Wilhelm von Tegheltoff reports the famous sentence: “Iron men with wooden ships defeated wooden men with iron ships.” So, Tegheltoff stressed the virtues of the imperial subjects vis-à-vis the lack of moral strength of the opponents. As a matter of fact, the kingdom of Italy's fleet was stronger in numbers and technologically more advanced, but less organized and riddled with conflicts among the admirals. Quite differently, hundred years later, one of the most prominent journalists and writers from the Italian region of Veneto, Guido Piovene, said that: “the battle of Lissa has been the last great victory of the Venetian fleet.” The reason for such statement is that the mariners boarded in the Austro-Venetian fleet were all from former Venetian lands, such as Veneto, Istria and Dalmatia. Therefore, from this standpoint, the battle of Lissa is a matter of an “Italian” dispute between different maritime traditions, namely the Adriatic one of Venice and the antagonist Genoese or Neapolitan. Conversely, in Croatia and Slovenia, there is usually a different version of the story. The battle of Lissa is seen as a victory of a Croatian-Slavic navy over the Italians. Particularly, the battle of Vis (Lissa) is usually referred to as part of Croatian national history and it is a crucial step to legitimize the Croatian identity on the Adriatic Sea, because many of the sailors were ethnically Croats.

Yet, this is not a book on the tourism industry; nor is it on the changes induced by it, or on how it has been analyzed by social science disciplines, but on the social nature of tourism. Together, all the case studies reflect an effort to understand global and mobile dynamics and the production of collective memories and cultural identities in the Mediterranean region through ethnographic examples from different areas (such as Andalusia, Crete, Istria, Costa Blanca, Marseille, Mallorca, Lesvos, and Marrakech). However, this context of global mobilities cannot be understood apart from the constant presence of tourists in the Mediterranean coasts. Tourism has been the driving agent of the essence and orientalizing images of most of Mediterranean territories during the last 100 years (Tzanelli, 2003). Labor immigrants, tourists, and new residents from various nationalities and with different personal motivations converge and share with locals the same locations, and create new places that mushroom all over the territories, be it urbanizations, private beaches, or even detention hotels. Besides, the increasing voting relevance of these new social categories through their participation in local and regional elections is adding value to their role as social agents in the political sphere (Chueca Sancho & Aguelo Navarro, 2009; Janoschka, 2010). The practices and the meanings that give sense to daily life (culture) seem to blur traditional dichotomous notions such as leisure/labor, locals/residents, and nationals/foreigners.

Antonio Aledo <antonio.aledo@ua.es> is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Alicante (Spain). With Ph.D. in sociology and a master degree in anthropology, he studies relationships among tourism, urbanism, and the environment. He has conducted fieldwork in Brazil and Central America on the development of residential tourism generated by international demand.