Preliminary Programme

The paper deals with the evolution of beach and maritime activities along the Italian Adriatic coast from the Twenties to the Sixties, focusing on the towns of Riccione, Rimini and Cervia (the Romagna Coast) whose tourist development dates back to the last decades of the 19th century. In the interwar years, beach started to be managed on a unified basis and rules and routines replaced the spontaneous development of undertakings of the previous decades. Consequently, new professions emerged as the beach director, beach service attendants, lifeguards, beach guards, crafts and boats charterers. The skills and competences, which took shape during the interwar years, became an intangible heritage to transmit to the next generations (an example of craftsmanship, to mention the 2003 Unesco Convention for intangible heritage). After the Second World War, the return to a democratic regime redesigned the symbolic meaning of tourism, however maintaining part of the organizational models of the previous decades. In addition to that, the interaction between residents and tourists stimulated the creation of new rituals as the opening and closure of the tourist season or some feasts, as for instance the “Rustida”, which was introduced by residents to say thank to tourists for the help they gave during the 1964 flood. In conclusion, the landscape transformation of coastal areas came along with a new vision of the sea and the development of new rituals, which contributed to redesign the economy and the material culture of coastal areas. (Show less)

Seaside tourism has become increasingly important during the last century. The beach and the sun has triumphed as symbols of leisure and vacationing. The present paper will focus on the first stages of this evolution, when seaside tourism was still partly linked to health discourse practices.
The case study of the territory of the Northern Adriatic (focusing on today’s Slovenian and Croatia) coast will be presented – namely the seaside localities of the interwar Venezia Giulia, which after WWI were subject to the change of political regimes (from the land Austrian Littoral – part of Austro-Hungary to the Kingdom of Italy). This period represents a significant transition from elite tourism to its greater social accessibility. In this sense the role and promotion of political regime propaganda in creating and promoting leisure activities of the interwar Italian political regime (fascist) will be taken into closer consideration. I will consider and analyse tourist offer at seaside resorts, promoted or supervised by the political authorities.
My interest is to acknowledge how tourist localities in the Northern Adriatic coast developed in this period, which were the targeted investments in accommodation and leisure infrastructure, what significance was given to sport activities within the maritime resorts and what social and economic impact this process had. (Show less)

During the first third of the 20th century, an incipient tourist system took shape in Spain. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 and until 1939 had a huge impact on that system, but it did not manage it to disappear. So, during the first Franco regime (before 1959), Spain managed to rebuild its tourist system, achieving that maritime tourism, thanks to its Mediterranean climate, was having more and more importance in the country's tourist offer. Thus, new tourist spaces at the edge of the sea were added to the traditional tourist spaces (San Sebastián and Santander). (Show less)

The most difficult challenge at a particular point of time is to grasp the essential features of the time or era we live in. Scientific progress seems to occur, especially in terms of subtle technical improvements in communication, medicine, social life and other everyday facilities, however, with regard to genuine humanity this technical progress might be an illusion and in fact be a disaster. The latter would be the case, when human and cultural studies do remain simply a blind reaction to the technical advantages and a joyful consumer of them. Such a scientific behaviour is an ideological one, is knowledge based, but this knowledge is an ideological one and has itself a destructive impact on societies.

Therefore, I speak out the following seven questions: (1) What signifies this new ideological turn in human studies? (2) Who are the authors, advocates and promoters of this ideological
turn? (3) Could this now ongoing ideological turn cause serious problems for contemporary living human beings and for future generations? (4) Which human conditions are favoured by the ideological turn at the beginning of the 21st-century? (5) What are the methodological features of the ideological turn? (6) Is there political support of the ideological turn and even a
demand for this turn? And (7), is there a hidden trigger of the ideological turn or is it a self-fulfilling circle?

The aim of my contribution is to provide an answer to these questions. (Show less)

While other Western states kept communist leaders mostly at distance, British governments put their monarch regularly in contact with them. Queen Elizabeth II meet with Tito from Yugoslavia (1972), Ceausescu from Romania (1978) and others. During these meetings, she functioned as a symbol of Western values and, paradoxically, the embodiment of democracy. She also set the stage for business deals contrived by her governments.
My presentation will explore the cultural meanings and politics behind these special encounters. It aims to explain to what extent the British governments made use of the apolitical monarchy to foster their political interests during the Cold War; a perspective which will contribute to the still understudied political history of the twentieth-century British monarchy. To archive that I will first apply a history of knowledge approach: what was the concept of monarchical state visits to and from communist countries? How were they considered to be different from other state visits? Next to that, I will analyse the practices of these visits: what was the performance of Western values like? What role did the monarchy play in these settings? To answer such questions even visits that were discussed, but never actually carried out – such as visits to the Soviet Union – provide a rich source of information on these points. All in all, my contribution will allow new insights into Britain’s self-perception as third world power brokering between East and West and the functions of modern monarchy. (Show less)