2024-2025 Colloquium Series
“The Venice of…”: Life, Death, Tourism, and Gondolas in le Serenissime
Stephanie Malia Hom, Professor of Transnational Italian Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Friday, January 31, 4PM-6PM PDT
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Abstract
Italy has long been a commodity produced for and consumed by tourists. Yet of all Italian cities,
Venice has come to exert significant power over the imaginary of destination Italy. Arguably more so
than any other city, it has been reproduced time and again in places as far-flung as Las Vegas and
Tokyo where simulacra of Venice draw tens of millions of tourists each year. Alongside simulacra,
this talk explores practices of what I call “aspirational simulation”—nicknaming and gondola
rides—to consider how destination Venice has not only taken hold around the world but also come
to dominate the touristic imaginary of Italy. In what ways has Venice become a symbolic geography
appropriated by cities across the Americas, Europe, and Asia? Why do cities exert a claim to become
“The Venice of…” (i.e., America, France, the North, the East, and so on), and what is at stake for
these cities in doing so? Why has the Venetian gondola ride become a global tourist attraction? I
argue that Venice in all its forms, original and copies, transmits a fantasy of immortality that drives
our attraction to it. Venice stokes in us an unconscious desire to live and love forever. Its constant
resurrection through simulacra and simulation perpetuates this desire. With full-scale replicas,
nicknames, and gondola rides multiplying worldwide, we might say that Venice has not only
survived, but also in the global competition for tourist attention, it has achieved survival of the
fittest.
Speaker Bio
Stephanie Malia Hom is Professor of Transnational Italian Studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara and co-founder of the Tourism Studies Working Group at UC Berkeley.
She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and
imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history, theory, and practice. She is the author
of Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell 2019) and The
Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto 2015). She is also co-editor
of Crime Italian Style: Illegality and the Making of Italy (Liverpool, forthcoming), “Borderless Italy,” a
special journal issue of California Italian Studies (2019), and Italian Mobilities (Routledge 2016). Her
essays and articles have been published in wide range of venues, including the leading journals in the
fields of Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore.
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