In the aftermath of WWII, the Italian tourism sector, as the rest of the national economy, had to undertake a complex and crucial phase of reconstruction. This essay investigates the second postwar period focusing on the case study of S.A. Terme e Grandi Alberghi di Sirmione. Using documentary material from different archives, the aim is to reconstruct the strategies adopted by the spa company to revive its tourism activities, contextualizing them in the developments of the Garda area. In a crucial phase, when western tourism was acquiring a mass dimension, the new shareholders started afresh from the reconstruction of the accommodation facilities following logics of diversification and innovation.
This article reconstructs the heated – local and national – debate around the consistent and pervasive foreign presence in the border territory of Lake Garda on the eve of the Great War. Here, the growing nationalistic tensions that preceded the conflict intertwined with the emerging hospitality industry. Tourism, seen as a social phenomenon, can thus offer a privileged perspective on the transformations of the general context of the time. Introduced by Austro-Germanic inhabitants of the lake at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the hospitality industry on Lake Garda flourished up to the eve of the Great War. There were, however, also opponents to this model of development. The dispute escalated to the point that, in the perception of the locals, the ‘outsiders’ turned into ‘enemies’ and Lake Garda increasingly became a disputed area: a symbol of the tensions of the time.
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