UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group - news_detail   

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

Hosted on Zoom: [click here] *

Please join us for dinner and further conversation at the Great China Restaurant, Bancroft Avenue, Berkeley (6:15pm). RSVP required for dinner. Please e-mail graburn@berkeley.edu

*There is no password needed to join this meeting. However, please ensure that you are logged into your Zoom account before clicking on the meeting link.

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.



 
web design fgi ©2021 Tourism Studies Working Group is an advanced tourism studies and research forum
U.C. Berkeley | v.1.0 | updated: 27 Jan 2010