Tourism. Retrotopian Time-Travel (part one)

Abstract

The study historicizes the phenomenon of the tourism as a purely modern variety of the mobility of which inner morphology began to take form at the turn of the 19th century. First, the study draws on the innovative approach of Hasso Spode, historian of mentality, who has a profound influence over contemporary research of the history of tourism in German historiography. Using his theoretical framing, the study discloses how a travel that, from the late 18th century, had a diverse set of motives, experiences, ideas and practices, started to be cemented by a psychomental foundation: the tourist gaze. Then, the study interprets tourism as the product of spatialization of time and temporalization of space. Finally, the article, using Zygmunt Bauman´s theoretical conception of “retrotopia“, clips today´s form of tourism together with its primordial form and leads to the conclusion that tourism as a controversial phenomenon of modern times is endowed with human nostalgia, romance, a never-ending desire for authenticity as well as an eternal obsession with the idea of “progress” encompassing also utopian notions.