Tourists and meteorologists in the Italian Riviera: The Journal de Bordighera (1883–1935) as a source for the study of the local climate

Abstract

The Italian Riviera was, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the Second World War, one of the most famous, elitist, climatic, winter, international tourist destinations. In Bordighera, in particular, the British community was so important that a typical English ‘environmental bubble’ was created, and still today there is not only physical, but also cultural evidence of it. Among the latter, the polyglot Journal de Bordighera (1883–1935), a large number of issues of which are still held at the local Museum Bicknell, is the privileged witness of the carefree life of the tourists spending their winter on the Riviera in that period. One of its weekly columns, the ‘Bulletin Météorologique’, contains precise data, collected by the tourists themselves, about the temperatures of the resort, while comments on the special climate of the region are scattered across different issues. That information is unique for Bordighera because, even if the location has always been appreciated for its mild climate, surprisingly no other meteorological data have ever been recorded for such a long period. The aim of this paper is twofold: to reconstruct this historical climatological series, which appears to have reasonable historical reliability, if verified with the series of other weather stations of the Riviera, and to consider the observations about the climate published by the tourist meteorologists on the Journal de Bordighera as a positioned way to observe and to narrate the climate of the Riviera.