Consuming the view: tourism, Rome, and the topos of the Eternal City.

Hom, Stephanie Malia

Introduction

In a short story by Luigi Malerba titled "Consuming the View," the narrator laments that the view of Rome has suddenly gone out of focus. Standing atop the Janiculum hill, the panorama keeps getting blurrier as the days go by. Romans rush out to get their eyes checked. Special experts, or "panoramologists," are called in to analyze the situation. In all, we discover that the all-consuming gaze of tourists is slowly wearing away the view of Rome (3-8).

The premise of Malerba's story is based on an earlier dream recorded in his 1981 Diario di un sognatore: "Mi aggiro preoccupato fra i turisti del Gianicolo. Devo parlare con il sindaco, mi dico. Questi turisti a forza di guardare il panorama di Roma finiranno per consumarlo, bisogna proteggere il panorama di Roma dagli sguardi corrosivi dei turisti [...]. Mi affaccio al muretto e vedo che il panorama effettivamente e un po' sfocato e consunto. Bisogna abolire anche i cannocchiali a pagamento, deve intervenire il sindaco" ("I wander, preoccupied, among the tourists on the Janiculum. I must speak with the mayor, I say to myself. These tourists, by dint of [their] looking at the panorama of Rome will end up consuming it; the panorama of Rome needs to be protected from the corrosive gazes of the tourists [...]. I look over the wall and I see that the panorama is effectively a little blurry and worn out. The for-pay binoculars also need to be abolished; the mayor must intervene," 64). (1)

The narrator's antipathy can be said to represent a generalized resistance to mass tourism as a modern phenomenon, not only in Italy, but also throughout the Western, industrialized world. (2) This opposition is linked to tourism's success in transforming, for better or worse, the identities and landscapes with which it comes in contact. In Rome, while tourism has not blurred the panorama in the ways described by Malerba, its subjective and material artifacts have become interchangeable with the city's landscape: souvenir stands, camera-toting tourists, and open-air tour buses.

Tourism is an exemplary practice of cultural production, rooted in the nexus of capitalism and modernity. The figure of tourist, Dean MacCannell has argued, can be taken as a lens for viewing modernity, if not as "one of the best models of modern man in general" (1). Tourists suffer from a generalized anxiety about the anomie and fragmentation of modernity, and thus search for an authenticity outside of themselves. They physically travel to an elsewhere in the hope of experiencing something real, something that has not been corrupted by the industrial age. MacCannell goes so far as to say that the empirical and ideological expansion of modern society is intimately linked to the rise of modern mass leisure. As a practice, tourism positions itself as a means to assuage this modern alienation. It frames Italy as something "authentic"--a place that escaped the worst of the industrial age, inhabited by people who, in defying all convention, aim to live a life of leisure. In tourism, Italy becomes a seemingly permanent place: an old world unchanged for centuries, a peninsula anchored by Rome, la citta eterna.

What is more, Nelson Graburn has convincingly described modern tourism as a form of secular pilgrimage. During the tour, he argues, in "Tourism: The Sacred Journey," that tourists experience a sacred time, set apart from everyday life. The rewards of being a tourist--mental and physical health, social status, and diverse, exotic experiences--are similar to the rewards of religious pilgrimage, such as accumulated grace and moral leadership in home communities. In the case of Rome, advertised as the capital of both Western civilization and Christendom, modern tourists might be considered pilgrims in both senses, both religious and secular.

Long before Malerba penned his short story, or MacCannell formulated his new theory of the leisure class, or Graburn theorized tourism as secular pilgrimage, tourism played a key role in constructing both modern Rome and modern Italy. For example, at the moment Italy found itself grappling with its newfound identity as a united nation-state, and Rome acquired its identity as national capital, tourism swiftly swept through the peninsula with the rapid construction of railroads, the creation of package tours, and the invasion of golden hordes (Turner and Ash 1). (3) It was in the mid-nineteenth century that modern Italy and mass tourism first intersected, a convergence that would transform the character of each in the centuries to come.

This essay explores the idea of Rome as Eternal City, or citta eterna, and traces how this expression has shifted from the imperial and religious rhetoric of the nineteenth century and earlier, to the touristic sphere of the twentieth and twenty-first. The city embodies the sacred and the secular, and travelers have come for generations to experience this dual heritage. As such, the basic tenets of tourism in Rome have remained constant for centuries. However, tourism orients the topos of the Eternal City toward the past, whereas the initial usage of the expression urbs aeterna was future-oriented. The topos marks the temporal fixity of the capital, rendering it a place of multiple pasts to be visited: Classical, Christian, Renaissance, baroque, and Fascist. In representation and practice, tourism frames Rome as a static space of the past, and anchors the city within the well-bounded limits of its heritage, casting it as a destination that has not suffered the ruptures of modernity (Berman 15-36). Tourism, this quintessential phenomenon born of modernity, thus constructs modern Rome as a non-modern destination, spurious as this might be, and it does so through the topos of the Eternal City.

The identification of Rome with its heritage produces a shift from future to past in the topos. (4) Correspondingly, the city's touristic signification comes to dominate its religious one. In representation, tourists view and consume the histories selected for them by the tourism industry. In practice, tourists treat the capital as a museum--a fixed space to be experienced by secular and religious pilgrims, and a backdrop against which to display ruins and artifacts. In short, Rome's modern identity is intimately bound up with mass tourism and the millions of tourists that visit it each year. These tourists engage in specific praxes, such as reading guidebooks and taking tours, that privilege and orient the city toward a touristically determined "past." It is this retrospect which renders Rome eternal.

In part one of this essay, I explore the rhetorical history of the Eternal City, beginning with ancient Rome, and shows how the topos of the urbs aeterna vacillated between imperial and cosmic significations, both of which referred to the future of the city and its empire. The second part describes the overlapping political and religious uses of the Eternal City during Italian unification in the nineteenth century. In this century, mass tourism privileged Rome-as-antiquity over Rome-as-religious-center: foreign tourists successfully co-opted the Eternal City, shifting the topos from future to past. Part three takes the tourist guidebook as the textual medium that perpetuates this retrospective orientation, and shows how these texts use the topos of the Eternal City to "fix" Rome temporally as a place of multiple pasts.

The Long History of the "Urbs Aeterna"

To contemplate the shift from future to past in the topos of the Eternal City, let us take a detour back through Classical Rome to explore the origins of this rhetorical figuration. "Urbs aeternd" is, as Kenneth J. Pratt describes, "a verbal image [that] has become one of the most long-lived concepts in history" (25). The Eternal City first appeared as a topos in the elegies of the Roman poet Tibullus circa 19BC, that is, at the moment that Augustus transformed Rome from the seat of a Republic to the capital of an empire. For Tibullus, Rome was the urbs aeterna founded by Romulus--"Romulus aeternae nondum formaverat urbis"--that, because of Augustus, would live on forever despite the prediction that the city would fall after twelve centuries (Elegiae II, Carmen 5.21). As imagined by Tibullus, the Eternal City was a distinctly imperial concept, linked to the future of Rome's empire and governance.

His contemporaries Ovid, Virgil, and Livy also believed in the imperial eternity of the capital. Like Tibullus, both Ovid and Virgil linked the urbs aeterna to the city's founder, Romulus, with Virgil arguing, in a famous line from the Aeneid, that Rome would live on as an "empire without end," or imperium sine fine (I. 279). (5) In his Fasti, Ovid named Romulus as the father of the Eternal City: "urbs erat, aeternae cum pater urbis ait (III. 72)." Livy adopted a more pragmatic approach in Ab urbe condita, using the idea of urbs aeterna to make a case for the social and military unity of the capital to insure its future. (6)

Alongside these political appropriations of the Eternal City, its corollary phrase, Roma aeterna, imparted a pagan, if not spiritual, valence to the concept. Eternity became fitted within a polytheistic religious structure, with Augustus himself being linked to the cult of the goddess Roma (Pratt 31). In this sense, the emperor became the city, and the city the emperor: both would live on forever.

Religious scholar Mircea Eliade argued in his work on eternal return that Rome as urbs aeterna was linked more to historical cycles and cosmic regeneration than imperial politics. He noted that Romans lived in great fear of an ekpyrosis, or a "catastrophe that marked the transition of an age" (133-35), and that they feared an imminent catastrophe would cause Rome to disappear. Eliade noted that Augustus's ascension as emperor assuaged these fears, and Romans came to believe that a transition into the golden age of empire had been accomplished without an ekpyrosis. Augustus emerged as a new founder of the city, and in defying the prophecy that Rome would fall, Romans believed that the city could regenerate itself ad infinitum. This, according to Eliade, demonstrated "a supreme effort to liberate history from astral destiny [and] cosmic cycles, and to return, through the myth of the eternal renewal of Rome, to the [...] re-generation of the cosmos through its eternal re-creation by [a] sovereign or priest" (136). Rome, re-generated under Augustus, not only emerged as an eternal city, but a universal one as well. Or, as Jean Hubaux referred to it, Rome became a cosmopolis, or a "city of the cosmos" (123).

As Augustus's reign drew to a close, the eternity of Rome was simultaneously imperial and cosmic. The urbs aeterna was both an empire without end as well as a universal center of re-generation. The topos was clearly oriented toward Rome's future. In this conception of the Eternal City, temporality was linked to re-generation, or the city's ability to perpetually recreate itself and insure its future survival. As Christianity and its distinct teleology gained hold in the Italian peninsula, however, notions of temporality soon changed to signify everlastingness from a point in time onward (Le Goff 29-52).

In this evolving Christian worldview, such as that espoused by Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century CE, only God could be eternal. Yet Augustine's attitude toward Rome could only be described as ambivalent at best. On one hand, he claims in De civitate dei that the Roman empire was finite and only the city of God could be eternal: "illa civitas sempiterna est" (V.16). In the same paragraph, he refers to Rome and its citizens as being of "an eternal city" ("verum etiam ut cives aeternae illius civitatis" V.16). For the most part, Augustine regarded Rome as temporary, whereas a city of God would last forever. Yet in a contradiction of terms, Augustine successfully appropriated Virgil's idea of Rome as an empire without end and applied it to the kingdom of God. (7) For him, "the Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity" ("Incomparabiliter superna est civitas clarior, ubi victoria veritas, ubi dignitas sanctitas, ubi pax felicitas, ubi vita aeternitas" II.29). In doing so, Augustine successfully conflated--vis-a-vis Virgil--the future-oriented urbs aeterna of Rome with the Eternal City of God. This conflation would hold within Christian theology well into the Middle Ages and beyond. Rome became a God-given empire, and likewise, its leader came to be known as the Holy Roman Emperor.

Then, for seven centuries during the so-called "Dark Ages" between Augustine and Dante, the topos of Rome as Eternal City fell out of use, only to be revived during the Renaissance. (8) At this moment, Rome emerged as a center of Christian pilgrimage, which laid the foundations for it becoming a modern tourist destination. In 1143, the first guidebook, a pilgrimage manual written in Latin, the Mirabilia urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome), began to circulate (Marshall 1-15; Parsons 83-106). While it does not mention Rome as urbs aeterna per se, it does codify pilgrim's routes and itineraries in the city. It also includes non-religious sites on its list of what ought to be seen, almost all of which pertained to classical Rome. In a sense, then, the Mirabilia begins to privilege the city's heritage and constructs Rome, in part, as a destination of the past.

This early guidebook quite literally engages in what Dean MacCannell refers to as the site sacralization common to modern mass tourism (44-45). Similar to the process of creating tourist attractions, the Mirabilia named, framed, elevated, and enshrined the sites of Rome. Many of the sites named in the text, such as the Vatican, Castel Sant'Angelo, the Forum, Circus Maximus, and Trastevere, continue to be requisite attractions for any contemporary tourist to Rome. Compared to today's guidebooks, which seem to fall out of fashion every few months, the staying power of the Mirabilia was exceptional. It survived more or less in its current form, save a few added illustrations and expanded descriptions, for more than six centuries. Moreover, it was copied innumerable times in manuscript form as well as translated and published as a printed book in Germany, France, England and Italy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, myriad editions of the Mirabilia were published for the numerous aristocrats embarking on their voyage en Italie. In these centuries, Rome was re-made eternal again, not as imperial or cosmic or Christian, but this time, touristic. With the advent of mass tourism in the nineteenth century, Rome became "fixed" temporally as a capital of antiquity and Christendom: Secular pilgrims began to outnumber religious ones and the temporal significance of the Eternal City shifted from future to past.

Touring Rome: The Eternal City in the Nineteenth Century

According to historian Philip Boutry, Rome coalesced as a cultural center in the age of Romanticism, particularly with the aid of Grand Tourists and the attempt to integrate Rome into the Napoleonic order. Tourists revitalized the study of Roman antiquity--Mirabilia in hand, no doubt--and Napoleonic rule did much to quell the power of the Catholic Church. "Eternal" no longer signified God-given empire but once again marked the earlier meaning of urbs aeterna: as an imperial and now cultural territory without end. By the 1820s, Boutry argued, the role of the Church had been so greatly diminished that the papacy embarked on and failed in a project to re-brand itself and Rome as God's Eternal City. Instead, the tourists arriving in the capital insisted on Rome as an eternal font of culture stemming from its classical and Renaissance pasts.

Within the Italian political establishment, a similar debate ensued. The famous Italian nationalist and Jesuit priest, Vincenzo Gioberti, argued in his Primato morale e civile degl'Italiani of 1843 that Rome was the Eternal City because it incarnated the philosophical idea of immanence, or, more simply, the city manifested God's divine spirit. (9) For him, the Eternal City was necessarily a sacred city. Likewise, Giuseppe Giusti, the Tuscan satirical poet involved in the push toward Italian unification in the late 1840s, also considered Rome as eternal site of the papacy, but expressed skepticism of the popes themselves. Describing the election of Pius IX in 1846 in his Cronaca dei fatti di Toscana, he wrote that the whole world would be watching the Eternal City: "Tanto ando oltre questo suono delle novita di Roma, che il mondo se ne riscosse e le genti cominciarono a rivolgere lo sguardo o a tenerlo piu che mai fisso alla citta eterna" ("This sound of the latest news of Rome went over to such an extent that the world shook, and the people began to turn their gaze, or to hold it more firmly than ever toward the Eternal City," 94). Yet he apparently had little faith in the papacy at the time, vehemently declaring that priests would never change: "Son preti, sentitemi, son preti! E quando s'e detto prete s'e detto tutto: il lupo muta il pelo ma il vizio mai" ("They are priests, hear me, they are priests! And when we say 'priest' that says it all: the wolf changes its fur, but never its vice," 89). The papacy, he claimed, would do little to unite Italy, much less create a nation that would restore Italians to the grandeur and illustriousness of ancient Rome (83). For Giusti, Rome should have embodied both imperial and spiritual eternality. Even well into the twentieth century, the overlap between the political and religious "eternal" persisted in the Italian language in relation to Rome. For instance, the renowned novelist of the Italian avant-garde, Aldo Palazzeschi, acknowledged both aspects in his formulation of the Eternal City in his Opere giovanili published in 1958: "Ecco aprirsi davanti allo sguardo la Roma dei Cesari o dei Papi: la citta eterna" ("Here the Rome of the Caesars or of the Popes unfolds before one's gaze: the Eternal City," 842). For him, Rome was the city of both Caesars and popes, imperial and religious.

Foreign tourists in Italy rendered Rome eternal far more effectively than these Italian writers, fixing it as a cultural capital, a place literally "out-of-time," belonging only to the past. (10) The city becomes equated with history and, as such, many Grand Tourists described Rome as a city frozen in time (Michie 137-48). In addition to Rome, we should note that northern Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often framed Italy, too, as being stuck in time, part of an ancient South juxtaposed against a modern (and modernizing) North (Dainotto 143-50). Chloe Chard has expertly explored the ways in which foreign travelers to Italy "deflected to the past" from the mid-eighteenth century onward, wherein the traveler, upon seeing an attraction, converted historical time into personal experience (232-36). Travelers forced attractions to reveal a profound interiority in their narratives. Chard explains that this forced interiority produced an emotional bond between traveler and site/sight, precipitating a deflection to two very different, but "Italian" pasts. She writes: "[...] on the one hand, Italy is presented as bearing the traces of a past of classical grace, sunshine, tranquility [...] on the other hand, the traveler can deflect back to a violent, turbulent, 'Gothic' past, full of blood, horror, luxury and excess" (234). Tourism, Chard notes, designates attractions where these pasts are made to maintain their distance.

In this sense, tourism not only identifies the past as a threat, but also works to contain it. Chard has shown that foreign travelers on the Grand Tour considered that past to be destabilizing, and feared that the historical past would intervene in the personal dramas of the present (140-44). Simply put, they believed the past had the power to disrupt lives in the present. Mass tourism, arriving on the peninsula with Thomas Cook in 1864, fixed a canon of tourist attractions that would keep the past in abeyance. Through various strategies of distancing--declarations of uniqueness, setting site/sights apart from topography--Chard writes that tourists could experience the past in Italy without forging emotional bonds to it (222-26).

What is more, the topos of the Eternal City signified a past of non-violence, that of "grace, sunshine, [and] tranquility." This invented past is one of civilized grandeur, and Rome became its cultural capital. For example, Goethe, on his famous Italian journey from 1786 to 1788, defined the experience of the past as central to his experience of Rome. (11) He writes:

What I want to see is the Everlasting Rome, not the Rome which is replaced by another every decade. It is history, above all, that one reads quite differently here from anywhere else in the world [...]. All history is encamped about us and all history sets forth again from us. This does not apply only to Roman history, but to the history of the whole world.

(154)

For Goethe, Rome is the locus of all history ("Weltgeschichte"). In this passage, "history" takes on a spatial connotation, for it is not necessarily the written record of the past, but instead, the past that is incarnated within Rome's topography. The past is "encamped about" Goethe; he wants to see and arguably consume it. Expressing this desire, Goethe partakes in an ideological operation common to Grand Tour, or what Eric Cheyfitz terms the translatio studii et imperii, (movement of power and knowledge) from East to West, or in this case, from South to North (104-41). Loredana Polezzi explains that northern European travel writers like Goethe constructed an image of Italy not only as the glorious site of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, and the cultural and artistic achievements of the Renaissance, but also as a geography of decadence. They positioned themselves as "the modern inheritors of Italy's (or, by extension, Rome's) lost power and splendor" (33). Goethe wanted to see, consume, and appropriate for himself Rome's glorious past of antiquity and Christendom. For him, this idea of Rome was eternal, unlike the decadent one replaced every decade (Buzard 131-132; Littlewood 11-27). (12)

Likewise, Nathaniel Hawthorne, during a rare glimpse of authorial voice in The Marble Faun, classified "the very dust of Rome [as] historic"; it was dust that "inevitably settles on our page, and mingles with our ink" (79). The past was thus made present, as if by some osmotic operation, through Hawthorne's pen. Also similar to Goethe, Hawthorne proclaims Rome to be eternal through the voice of his protagonist, Hilda: "[Rome] the City of all time, and of all the world!" (87). Goethe and Hawthorne are just two examples of travelers who temporally fix Rome, equating the city's eternal character with that of the past. (13) We could just as well speak of other foreigners, such as Madame De Stael, Stendhal, and Dickens among them. Together, they established Rome as a city frozen in time, a place where the past was to be experienced, as all Romantics might have insisted, with a nostalgic attitude. These travelers helped to make Rome, as Catherine Brice has noted in her extensive history of Rome, into a new society, but one now oriented retrospectively (216-21).

By the 1860s, however, the singular travelers of the Grand Tour had largely ceased to exist. Instead, tens of thousands of foreign tourists descended upon Italy with the help of British tour operator Thomas Cook, all desiring to see Rome first-hand en masse. (14) They, too, considered it the city "of all time, and of all the world!" In an 1868 article published in Cook's magazine, Cook's Excursionist and Home and Foreign Tourist Advertiser, Cook himself exclaimed of Rome: "To have seen Rome, is to have seen the world" (4). Like their predecessors, this new segment of middle-class tourists regarded Rome as a static space of the past, punctuated by artistic and architectural ruins. To them, the city was a repository of both classical and Renaissance culture, with less emphasis on the city's Catholic heritage. Antiquarianism was, indeed, one of the dominant interests of these tourists to Italy, who could now partake in the elitism associated with the Grand Tour while on a budget. Polezzi shows that this "archaeological attitude" fossilized representations of Italy, implementing cultural stereotypes about Italy and Italians that have remained unchanged for centuries (28-31). With great disdain for the papacy, Cook privileged the classical heritage of Rome and included as little Church history as possible on his tours. He was hardly an exception among Northern European travelers to Italy insofar as many of them regarded the Catholic Church with a mix of horror and fascination (Chard 93; Margarito 9-36). Cook's vehement disapproval of papacy was quite tangible in an article published in 1864 in his weekly magazine:

In [Italy], we witness[ed] exhibitions of priestly domination and superstitious abjection of the most distressing character, and we felt as though we could but weep over the abominations and blasphemies of their rites and ceremonies. Never, never can Italy be really free till the light of Truth and Christian simplicity prevails over such solemn fooleries as it was our lot to witness in the streets and squares of Florence, where bloody crucifixes were paraded about by rude boys, and thousands fell on their knees before ridiculous figures and effigies of Virgin and child.

(2)

For Cook, Catholicism, as it was represented by the papacy (and its "solemn fooleries" and "ridiculous figures"), was an impediment to Italian unification. In the same article, he wrote that his tours were intended to illuminate the "noble, ingenious and vivacious Italians," who he believed to be "the real regenerators of Italy" (2). While Cook often scheduled his organized tours to Rome to correspond with Easter and other religious holidays, he judged churches and other religious sites for their artistic and historical value, and not necessarily their spiritual valence. In practice, Cook and his tourists privileged Rome-as-antiquity over Rome-as-religious-center.

Indeed, the omission of all but several Jubilee celebrations during the nineteenth century did not help Rome's position as a religious center (Trisco 85-94). The 1875 Jubilee was proclaimed a "solemn celebration" and the holy door (porta sancta) of Saint Peter's Basilica was not opened to pilgrims at all. This was quite a contrast to the Jubilee of 1450, when as many as 40,000 pilgrims were said to be arriving daily in Rome (Stopford 57). What is more, new destinations of Christian pilgrimage such as Lourdes and Santiago de Compostela began to rise in prominence during the nineteenth century, diverting some of the pilgrim traffic that might otherwise have gone on to Rome. (15)

By 1870, the year that Rome became part of the newly unified Italian nation-state, Cook's tourists numbered more than 10,000 on the peninsula. As a self-proclaimed patriot of the Italian state, Cook believed that the practice of tourism would help to advance national unification because foreigners and Italians alike could use the infrastructure of railways, hotels, traveler's checks, and so on, to get to know the country. (16) That year, Cook fully expected Rome to be declared the capital of Italy, as he wrote in an 1870 article in Cook' s Excursionist and Home and Foreign Tourist Advertiser:

Our expectation is that Rome will be the seat of Italian Government, and that the Pope will be strengthened and his independence augmented by his relief from the functions and perplexities of the temporal rule. We have no fear of Rome being closed against visitors, and are quite sure the political and social aspects of the place will be increased in salubrity by the termination of the suspicions and jealousies which religio-political contention has engendered.

(2)

As the national capital, Cook hoped that Rome would be liberated from the tensions between overlapping political and religious spheres. Again, his attitude was hardly unique, for the prevailing sentiment among Englishmen at the time was that they had a moral and historical duty to influence nations abroad. According to Polezzi, England proclaimed itself the natural heir to the great classical tradition, and thus came to perceive itself as Italy's champion for unification (30). Cook was particularly thrilled about the declaration of Rome as Italy's capital in 1871 because it fulfilled his (and his compatriots) moral duty. He wrote in Cook's Excursionist and Home and Foreign Tourist Advertiser in

1872:

Those Tourists who have not visited Rome since it became the capital of United Italy can scarcely comprehend the many changes, which are rapidly altering the outward appearance of the ancient city of the Caesars [...]. Rome is no more the City of the Dead, but of the Living. Her hour of prosperity has dawned at last, and when next the Tourist treads its pavements he will find them crowded by a population proud and joyous in its newly achieved political enfranchisement [...]. All this adds to the comfort of the Tourist, and will unquestionably lead thousands to visit the Eternal City, and, in not a few instances, to prolong their stay in the glorious capital of United Italy.

(4)

In this passage, Cook frames Rome as once being a "City of the Dead," which we may infer to mean a city of the past. Through political unification and more poignantly, through tourist visits, the city would come alive once again. Cook links the topos of Eternal City to the past ("ancient city of the Caesars") and the future, the "newly achieved political enfranchisement" that accompanies the nation-state. For a moment, he re-invokes the future orientation of the urbs aeterna, implying that Rome's eternal future hinged on its political identification, which was to be insured by its status as a "glorious capital of United Italy." Notwithstanding this one declaration, Cook's brand of mass tourism constructed Rome primarily as a city of the past, or better yet, an ideal tourist-historic city, which G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge define as having "both the particular use of history as a tourism resource and a use of tourism as a means of supporting the maintenance of the artefacts of the past and justifying attention to the historicity of cities" (3). After Rome was branded a capital of multiple heritages, the topos of the Eternal City acquired a retrospective orientation, and the "past" (as defined by Cook and the emerging tourism industry) became the view that tourists were supposed to consume.

Roman Guidebooks: Representing the Eternal in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The twentieth century might as well have been called the century of the guidebook, particularly in Italy. While Baedeker and Murray emerged as textual models by the late 1800s, and Thomas Cook printed his own series in the mid-1800s, the publication of guidebooks truly exploded in the early twentieth century (Parsons 177-293). Baedeker and Murray initially dominated the European market and were often translated into different languages. By the early 1900s, domestic guidebooks published by local touring clubs had grown in popularity throughout Europe and the U.S. (Gassan 51-74; Schaffer 169-220). For example, the first Michelin guide was published June 1900, aimed at Francophone cyclists and automobile enthusiasts. It quickly expanded, and by 1907 was being distributed as far away as Manila and Manaus, according to La saga du Guide Michelin (48).

Tourist guidebooks determined "what ought to be seen" of a nation, Rudy Koshar explains in his investigation of tourism and European national identities. These texts allowed the tourist to be a "better participant in the growing web of economic transactions that increasingly characterized modern nations" (327). Koshar relates tourism's ability to promote national identity to MacCannell's search for authenticity, insofar as the former represents a version of that search, that is, a quest for an authentic, national identity beyond the marketplace (325). Throughout the twentieth century, we might say that guidebooks emerged as a common means through which cultures and identities were represented.

For Italy and Rome, this raises the question of who exactly is behind these guidebooks and their representations of identity: To whom are these representations directed? In what context do these guidebooks utilize the topos of the Eternal City? The answers to these questions vary but, in general, can be divided between two distinct categories: foreign-language guidebooks (predominantly in English) and Italian-language guidebooks to Italy. The former category is tied to a rich genealogy of travel writing that constructs "Italy" as an object to be viewed. Loredana Polezzi explains that, "for centuries, Italy has been the subject of an identifiable tradition of texts produced by other European [and American] cultures and devoted to its description" (26). She notes that the foreign tourists' powerful gaze imposed prescribed images onto Italian landscapes, and localities then attempted to celebrate these visions of Italy. Foreign-language guidebooks reify this hegemony of vision, presenting what ought to be seen of Italy not so much in terms of national identity but rather as cultural stereotypes. In addition to being tied to this tradition of travel writing, foreign-language guidebooks to Italy are the cultural products of a distinctly northern European system of production--capitalism. They re-present Italy as a cultural commodity, to be used and consumed by northern European (and later American) tourists. (17)

Conversely, Italian-language guidebooks to Italy arose from different circumstances. The Touring Club Italiano (TCI) first published its Guida d'Italia series in 1914. These guidebooks were meant to help Italians get to know their own country through tourism and, as a result, to produce a sense of Italian national identity. As Leonardo Di Mauro writes, the Touring Club Italiano produced a touristic imagining of Italy in the early twentieth century: "Nella creazione dell'immagine turistica del nostro Paese il Touring Club Italiano ha svolto almeno nella prima meta del secolo un ruolo fondamentale" ("In the creation of the touristic image of our country, the Touring Club Italiano has played a fundamental role, at least in the first half of the [twentieth] century," 392). According to the club's founder, Luigi Vittorio Bertarelli, the Guida d'Italia series was meant to provoke in Italian tourists "un'aspirazione profondamente sentita, come naturale affermazione d'italianita, come desiderio di affrancazione di quella specie di monopolio, che il Baedeker si era creato anche per i viaggiatori italiani in Italia" ("A deeply felt aspiration, like [a] natural affirmation of Italianness, like [the] desire for liberation from the kind of monopoly that Baedeker had created for itself, [and] also for Italian travelers in Italy" qtd. in Vota 46). Bertarelli criticized Baedeker's guidebooks for failing to include all of Italy and considered them poor guides for Italian tourists discovering their own country.

The Guida d'Italia series originally consisted of seven volumes of around 300 pages each, complete with topographic maps, city plans, and details on natural and cultural attractions (Brusa 50-55). The volumes covered all the major regions of Italy, including Sicily, Sardinia, and the colonies. (18) Each guidebook was bound in red leather and measured about the same size as a Baedeker. The intent to "make Italy" through these guidebooks was clear from the outset, with Bertarelli declaring in a 1912 article: "Ogni forma di attivita nazionale, individuale e collettiva, sentira che il quadro della vita italiana, che ci accingiamo a tracciare per tutti i turisti italiani, sara un mosaico per il quale ciascuno puo--anzi deve--dare il proprio sassolino" ("Each form of national activity, individual and collective, will feel like a picture of Italian life that we are about to draw for all Italian tourists; it will be a mosaic in which each person can--indeed must--contribute one's own pebble," 580). With this construction metaphor, Italy becomes a mosaic made by Italians, tourists themselves, whose duty was to contribute their own "little stones" to the nation-state.

Italian or otherwise, all guidebooks are aggregates of historical fact, entertainment, and moral discourse, according to Stephen Gencarella. They are critical means for understanding the reception of socio-political orientations toward the past, present, and future. In particular, these texts are instrumental in ordering the past, in that guidebooks appease the "need to order, rank, and consume the 'most' significant [which] constitutes a central experience in much contemporary tourism" (Edensor 75). By incarnating a totalizing system of value insisting on "what ought to be seen," guidebooks successfully order place out of undefined space. We should add that guidebooks not only order space, but also time. By including timelines and historical backgrounds, guidebooks selectively determine what of the past should be represented as well as viewed. Yet from this ordering also comes blindness, as Roland Barthes has famously explained of the Blue Guide: by representing only select monuments, he writes, the guidebook "suppresses [in] one stroke the reality of the land and that of its people" (75). It constructs an artificial representation of a place reduced to its monuments, or better yet, a photographic ideal to be consumed by tourists. Instead of directing its readers to what ought to be seen, the guidebook--be it written by foreigners or Italians about Italy--blinds both tourist and toured.

Returning to the Eternal City, we find that twentieth- and twenty-first century guidebooks utilized the topos of the Eternal City to signify Rome's multiplicity of pasts. Whereas Thomas Cook briefly recalled the future orientation of the urbs aeterna by linking the Eternal City to Italy's newfound nation-state, the tourist guidebook of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries erases any disposition toward the future and solidifies the topos's retrospective orientation. The shift from future to past becomes complete. While the link between Rome as Eternal City and its multiple pasts is common to guidebooks of many languages, I limit my scope here to Italian- and English-language guidebooks by dint of the spatial constraints of this essay. The scholarship on touristic representations of Italy in non-Italian guidebooks is scarce; however, the few exceptions take care to mention the role of "history" as one of these texts' defining rhetorical features. (19)

Italian-Language Guidebooks

Starting in 1914, the Touring Club Italiano's multi-volume Guida d'Italia series aimed to unify Italy within a singular textual space. When used by Italian tourists, these texts sublimated "Italy" from cultural imaginary into physical place, and at the same time, they shaped an Italian tourist gaze. Indeed, the guidebooks were organized, quite literally, around a series of gazes. The earliest TCI guidebooks all began with the "sguardo d'insieme," or "summary gaze," which outlined the physical, historical, agricultural, and industrial characteristics of the region at hand. A subsequent "sguardo generale," or "general look," then preceded every sub-region or major urban area detailed in the text. The introductions of these early TCI guidebooks often describe the "sguardo generale" and its purpose as follows in this excerpt from a 1922 TCI guide to central Italy:

Lo sguardo generale. Chi lo studia prima di mettersi in viaggio comprendera assai meglio ogni cosa delle regioni visitate. La loro fisionomia, il loro carattere saranno meglio apprezzati. E un buon cannocchiale aggiunto alla vista turistica per scorgere un po' piu in la degli oggetti che passeranno sott'occhio: e un po' dell'anima regionale che viene messa in luce. La serie di questi studi regionali, a Guida compiuta, formera un quadro comparativo di tutto il Paese.

(9)

(The General Look. The person who studies this section before traveling will better understand everything in the regions visited. Their features and their characteristics will be better appreciated. It is a good telescopic lens added to the touristic perspective to discern a bit more of the objects that will pass under view: it is a bit of the regional spirit that is highlighted. The set of these regional studies, once the Guide is completed, will together form a comparative picture of the entire country.)

According to this introduction, the tourist who studies the "sguardo generale" of the text is apt to understand better the character of the regions visited. This particular section of the guidebook is also said to magnify the tourist gaze ("un buon cannocchiale aggiunto alla vista turistica"). Here the guidebook fuses sguardo and vista, thus doubling and intensifying tourist gazes, both in text and in practice. Together, these gazes are said to highlight a regional spirit ("l'anima regionale") as well as constitute a comparative picture of the entire country ("un quadro comparativo di tutto il Paese").

But "anima" is nowhere to be found in these descriptions, for the Italy constructed in these texts and by these gazes is one seemingly empty of Italians. Instead, it is an Italy reduced to historical monuments, as Roland Barthes would have it. Historical descriptions, listing every minute detail pertaining to monuments, piazze, buildings, and more, comprise the bulk of any Touring Club guidebook. Let us take, for example, this passage from the 1948 Guida breve to central Italy, describing part of Rome:

VI. L'Esquilino e S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura.

Dalla piazza Venezia si percorre la via dei Fori Imperiali, pag. 245, poi, e si volta a sin. in via Cavour, al cui inizio, a sin., si erge la medioevale Torre dei Conti. Proseguendo (in fondo alla via degli Annibaldi, a d., bella vista del Colosseo, pag. 246) si trova a d. la via di S. Francesco di Paola che, passando sotto un voltone dell'antica casa dei Borgia, sale a *S. Pietro in Vincoli (III 20) o basilica Eudossiana, fondata nel v. sec. dall'imperatice Eudossia per custodirvi le due catene (vincula) delle prigionie di S. Pietro in Palestina e in Roma. I papi Sisto IV e Giulio II la fecero restaurare da Meo del Caprino (xv sec.). (266)

VI. The Esquiline Hill and S. Lorenzo Outside the Walls

From Piazza Venezia, walk along the via dei Fori Imperiali, p. 245, then, turn to the left, onto via Cavour, at the beginning of which, on the left, stands the medieval Torre dei Conti. Proceeding (at the end of via degli Annibaldi, on the right, a beautiful view of the Colosseum, p. 246) one finds on the right the via di S. Francesco di Paola, that, passing under a vault of the ancient Casa dei Borgia, climbs to * Saint Peter in Chains (III 20), or Basilica Eudossiana, founded in the fifth century by the empress Eudossia to house the two chains (vincula) from the prisons of Saint Peter in Palestine and in Rome. The popes Sixtus IV and Julius II had it restored by Meo del Caprino (15th century).

This first paragraph is but one of thousands of itineraries outlined in the guidebook series. It uses bold print, capital letters, and italics to highlight the itinerary the tourist/reader should adopt. Again, Italians were to use these guidebooks to "get to know Italy" through travel, or "far conoscere l'Italia." As the passage shows, however, these itineraries, and to a larger extent the guidebooks altogether, not only reduce Italy to its monuments, but they also reduce it to the most microscopic of levels. Instead of gaining a sense of an anima regionale, the text lays out an endless procession of architectural and artistic monuments. The text is so compelled to represent these monumental excesses that its language is compressed to the most minimal of signifiers. The abundant abbreviations comprise a jargon, or better yet, they produce a sort of ciphertext that can be only understood, or decoded, from one's subjective position as an Italian tourist/reader traveling in Italy. Contrary to the text's aim of providing a comparative picture of the entire country, in practice the Touring Club guidebooks set forth an Italy emptied of Italians. In short, from the beginning of the twentieth century, they have constructed a nation fashioned through the meticulous, abbreviated circuits of its monuments.

When focusing on Rome, the Touring Club Italiano guidebooks use the topos of the Eternal City to emphasize its multiple pasts. Again, the 1948 Guida breve proclaims that the Eternal City exerts a profound attraction "over all souls and in all times":

E detta la Citta Eterna, l'Urbe, ossia la citta per eccellenza, caput mundi. Essa sta nella storia della civilta occidentale come il caposaldo che riassume l'antichita e determina l'evo moderno. Estese il suo dominio su quasi tutto il mondo antico, e maestra nel diritto, lo resse con le sue istituzioni, lo impronto di se, lo unifico, e caduto l'impero, continuo in questo compito come centro della cristianita [...]. La citta ha esercitato in tutti i tempi e su tutti gli animi un fascino profondo.

(235)

It [Rome] is called the Eternal City, the Urbe, that is the city par excellence, caput mundi. It lies in the history of western civilization as the cornerstone that encapsulates antiquity and determines the modern age. It extended its dominion over almost all the ancient world, and as teacher of law, it governed the world with its institutions, imprinted itself upon it, unified it, and after the fall of the empire, it continued in this work as the center of Christianity [...]. The city has exerted a profound attraction in all times and over all souls.

Rome is identified with the past, or as the passage asserts, with the history of Western civilization. The text lists the specific eras--ancient, Christian, medieval and Renaissance, baroque, and modern--that support Rome's historical significance. In the rest of the chapter, it describes what constitutes these histories, detailing ruins, museums, and churches in an endless textual procession. The 1925 Touring Club guidebook to Rome and its environs clearly states the re-presentation of these pasts as its aim: "Storia della citta, antichita classiche e cristiane, arte di tutte le epoche, collezioni e musei, dettagli precisi sulle chiese, i palazzi, i monumenti e via via quant'altro forma oggetto della Guida" ("The history of the city, its Classical and Christian antiquities, art of all ages, collections and museums, precise details about churches, palaces, monuments, and so on, form the subject of the Guide," 6). Historical descriptions of the city constitute hundreds of pages in the Touring Club guidebooks dedicated to Rome throughout the twentieth century. These texts frame the Eternal City as the location of histories as well as a history of locations (Clifford 31-37).

What is more, the multiplicity of pasts validates Rome's status as "realta e simbolo della Patria Italiana" ("reality and symbol of the Italian fatherland") in Italian-language guidebooks of the early twentieth century. We can speculate that these texts might unwittingly appropriate the imperial significance of the Eternal City insofar as Rome, the reality and symbol of the Italian patria, contributes to the rebuilding of an imperial image in post-Unification Italy--for instance, through the use of Rome and romanita to justify the Italian colonial project in Libya (Fuller 39-62). (20) The appropriation of the past, including Roman, Christian, and Renaissance heritages, and its re-fashioning in the name of empire would eventually become perfected under the Fascist regime.

English-Language Guidebooks

A different colonial framework operates through English-language guidebooks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like Thomas Cook and his masses of tourists who "colonized" Italy in the mid-nineteenth century (and continue to do so in the present day in places like "Chiantishire," for instance), these guidebooks engage the topos of the Eternal City to identify Rome as a locus of multiple pasts and to privilege Rome-as-antiquity over Rome-as-religious-center. More so than their Italian counterparts, these guidebooks assume a didactic attitude. They tell readers when to visit, what to wear, what to eat, etc.. More important, these texts describe what should be seen of Rome's histories by boldly listing and evaluating the top attractions "not to be missed!"

Some guidebooks, such as art/shop/eat Rome, use the topos of the Eternal City in reference to the city as a museum. In this sense, they perform a similar deflection to the past as that used by Grand Tourists:

The capital of an empire and then of a religion, with over 2750 years of history, Rome is justly known as the Eternal City and the Caput Mundi ('Head of the World'). From Classical antiquity to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the Baroque age to that of Neoclassicism and the Grand Tour, nowhere else is there such comprehensive evidence of the past. Rome is one great museum with an unparalleled collection of art.

(4)

In this passage, an "archaeological attitude" sets Rome apart from other capital cities, and the text goes on to list what comprises this "evidence of the past." By equating Rome with a museum, that is, a static place for displaying artifacts of the past, this guidebook implies that the city both represents the past and belongs to it. The Eternal City is oriented retrospectively and, in this passage, that retrospect has much to do with antiquarianism and little to do with its status as religious center. Nowhere is the Catholic Church mentioned here.

Similarly, the 2004 edition of Lonely Planet: Italy also classifies Rome as a museum, yet qualifies this categorization by saying the museum is alive, thanks to the ancient city living on in a modern one: "Rome--the Eternal City, also known for centuries as Caput Mundi (capital of the world), attracts nearly 20 million visitors a year [...] It is a living museum, an archaeological archive of Western culture, but also a constantly evolving vibrant city still creating new architectural wonders" (80). With the image of the living museum, this text hints that Rome is not solely a static place to display the past. However, its subsequent itineraries indicate otherwise, for they direct their readers to ancient, Christian, Renaissance and baroque monuments, and toward none of the modern city (e.g., EUR). The first edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook to Italy, published in 1993, neglects the modern city entirely, explaining that the Eternal City signifies a continuity of the past:

The ruined, but still imposing monuments of Rome represent a point of reference for a world, which, through the imperial, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, has always regenerated itself without interruption. As such, the cultured and well-to-do Europeans who, from the mid-17th-century onwards, rediscovered Rome, found in the 'Eternal City' an example of continuity from the pagan to the Christian worlds. In fact, from the time of the Roman Empire, through the development of Christianity to the present day, a period of more than 2500 years, daily life in Rome has produced an archaeological archive of Western culture.

(119)

In this sense, Rome as Eternal City is a construction of specific pasts, now including its Christian one. The topos, as used in this passage, signifies historical continuity between the city's pagan and Christian identifications. While Rome may not be a museum, it is an archive and therefore serves the same function: a repository for collecting and representing the past. other contemporary English-language guidebooks underscore the archaeological attitude of the Eternal City, but do not necessarily classify the city as a museum. In the 2007 edition of Italy for Dummies, for example, tourists are encouraged to walk through history, on the ruins of Julius Caesar and in the steps of Renaissance masters. The text introduces Rome as follows:

The seven hills of Rome have been continuously inhabited for the past 3,000 years or so. The Eternal City has lived through thousands of years of history, and today about 2.6 million people live--and many more work--in this place designed for chariots rather than cabs, with city buses and hordes of motorini (mopeds and motor bikes) buzzing around ancient sites [...]. Rome wasn't built in a day, or even a millennium, so don't think you can see it all in a day: Set aside several days to do the city right.

(138)

The topos of the Eternal City again orients Rome toward the past. The text implores its tourists "to do the city right," that is, by following the guidebook's itineraries to "correctly" experience the city's distinct histories. If the tourist/reader does not follow the guidebook's instructions, s/he will risk missing "the best deals and things to see and do." (21)

Even earlier, in the Holiday Magazine Travel Guide to Italy, the continuity of the past was the defining feature of Rome and Italy in general: "History is a living presence that has survived in the life and customs of the people" (9) and Rome is "3,000 years of layered history [...] cities within a city--ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, known to everyone and yet to all still unknown--Rome stands alone among modern cities" (39). With few exceptions, English-language guidebooks to Rome consistently describe the capital in terms of its multiple pasts, most utilizing the topos of the Eternal City. Rome, then, is experienced only as a product of its pasts, and it is this retrospective orientation that renders the city eternal.

Yet some guidebooks, such as the 2001 Cadogan Guide to Italy, lament that modern chaos has taken over Rome., or as the Cadogan Guide puts it, "the past Rome of the Caesars and the popes" (823). A large part of the chaos, according to this text, is the "endless caravan of tour buses [that] have a way of compromising even the most beautiful cities" (823). The guidebook assures its readers (tourists themselves) not to worry, stating: "Don't concern yourself; the present is only one snapshot from a 2,600-year history, and no one has ever left Rome disappointed" (823). This sort of reassurance seems a common feature of English-language guidebooks to Rome: they seek to comfort the tourist who might be overwhelmed by the intrusions of the present on the city's many pasts. The Fodor's Guide to Rome reminds its readers that "Rome wasn't built in a day--even two--and even locals themselves will tell you that it takes a lifetime to discover all the treasures that the Eternal City has to offer" (30). In short, despite the detailed itineraries and descriptions that codify Rome's retrospective orientation, English-language guidebooks tend to assure readers that Rome can never been seen completely, often citing the phrase, "Roma, non basta una vita." ("Rome, one lifetime isn't enough"). In another sense, these texts insist that tourists will have to return continually in order really to "see" the city, and in doing so they will perpetually re-discover Rome.

This essay has explored the topos of the Eternal City and showed how it shifted from the imperial and religious rhetorics of the nineteenth century and earlier to the touristic sphere of the twentieth and twenty-first. While Rome has long been the destination for religious pilgrims, its secular pilgrims--tourists--have identified the city exclusively with its heritage. Rome's modern identity is thus intimately bound up with mass tourism and the millions of tourists that visit it each year; its identity is linked to the touristically determined past(s) viewed and consumed by these tourists. Rome thus becomes equated with the past, and it is this retrospect that renders the city eternal.

Similar to the hardships often undertaken by religious pilgrims when making their sacred journeys, modern tourists also seem to suffer in order to see these Roman "pasts"--for example, shuffling under the hot sun along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, crowding into the Pantheon in droves, and waiting for hours to see St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museums. The question then becomes: Why? These tourists appear exhausted, often with blistered feet and, in the summer, grievous sunburns; leisure seems hardly their goal. Is suffering, then, an intrinsic part of heritage tourism? Is this suffering linked to Rome's identification with religious pilgrimage? or is it a change in the deflection to the past (as Chloe Chard said of Grand Tourists), performed by contemporary travelers? Instead of orienting themselves toward either a past of "classical grace, sunshine, [and] tranquility" or a past of "violence and turbulence, full of blood, horror and excess," perhaps these modern tourists "deflect" to, or better yet choose only to see, the past of grace and sunshine and then embody the past of turbulence and suffering. As mass tourism evolved since the Grand Tour, perhaps the views of Rome to be consumed by tourists have been reduced to only classical grace, sunshine, and tranquility, and that reduction must be compensated for elsewhere. The reduction and compensation of the past(s) could very well prove a fruitful direction for research on mass tourism in Rome as well as heritage tourism in general.

Overall, tourism has assumed a permanent presence in Rome since the mid-nineteenth century and remains an integral part of the city's contemporary landscape. Indeed, the requisite coin toss into the Trevi fountain, done by tens of thousands each day, might be said to insure the eternal renewal of Rome's tourist masses. Rome has, in a sense, become the Eternal Tourist City.

University of Oklahoma

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(1) All translations from the Italian are mine unless otherwise noted.

(2) On tourism as a modern phenomenon, see Aitchinson et al 1-49; MacCannell 1-37; and Urry 1-15.

(3) On the history of tourism in Italy, as well as Rome in particular, see also Baranowski and Furlough 1-31; Battilani 179-244; Feifer 7-27 and 95-136; Herzfeld 14-15; and Scardigli 1-10.

(4) Within the field of tourism studies, heritage tourism has received much scholarly attention, yet the meanings of "heritage" and "heritage tourism" are often contested, in practice and within the academic literature. It is generally accepted that heritage is linked to the past, and at its most basic, it refers to elements of a past that a society wishes to keep. Heritage is thus selected and selective. In the case of Rome, the topos of the Eternal City selects specific pasts, namely Classical and Christian, to signify the city's heritage (see Graham et al; Timothy and Boyd).

(5) According to Kenneth J. Pratt, the idea of Rome as caput mundi also originated with Livy and Ovid, and it was typically associated with the eternity of the city (Pratt 27, n10).

(6) In Book IV.4, "in aeternum urbe condita"; and Book V.7, "beatam urbem Romanam et invictam et aeternam." All Latin texts in this article were searched and cross-referenced with their English translations using the digital library available at: www.IntraText.com.

(7) In this passage, Augustine directly quotes Virgil, but instead of Jupiter speaking to Cytherea, it is the "one, true God" speaking to the Romans: "sed Deus unus et uerus nec metas rerum nec tempora ponit, Imperium sine fine dabit" ("The one true God, who fixes no bounds for you of space or time but will bestow an empire without end").

(8) There is some evidence that the idea of Rome as eternal persisted in the liturgical tradition; however, it was not until Dante referred to the city as a God-given "imperio sanza fine" in the Convivio (Book IV.10-13) that the topos began to experience its own renaissance (Pratt 33-35). Dante wrote that Rome was imperial and that God had specially arranged its origin ("speziale nascimento ") and its progress ("speziale processo").

(9) Gioberti writes, "Roma e la citta eterna, che non soggiace alle veci e alla forza del tempo, perche rappresenta l'Idea immanente in contrapposto colle cose transitorie" ("Rome is the Eternal City that is not subject to the vicissitudes and force of time, because it represents the idea of immanence set against transitory things" 92).

(10) On travel literature in the Italian context, see the special volume of Annali d'Italianistica (1996) dedicated to travel; Hester 3-50; and Polezzi. On tourism in post-unification Italy, see Bosworth 159-81.

(11) Goethe specifically uses the formulation of Rome as eternal city, or "ewige Roma," in his Roman Elegies (I.4).

(12) Goethe found much more than "history" in Rome. In his Roman Elegies, he writes of joyous sexual fulfillment and his conquest of Faustina and her "Roman bosom and body."

(13) On foreigners as well as Italians traveling through Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Black; Brilli 15-74; Clerici; Ross 187-282.

(14) On Thomas Cook, see Brendon; Cormack; Dawes; Swinglehurst 7-52; and Withey 135-219.

(15) On mass tourism and modern pilgrimage, see Eade and Sallnow 1-29 and Frey.

(16) A few decades later, the Touring Club Italiano, founded in Milan in 1894 and modeled after Cook's organization, would launch its own campaign to "far conoscere l'Italia" through tourism (see Bardelli 149-179; Pivato 39-76; and the section on Roman guidebooks in this article).

(17) In his oft-cited article, Cohen explores commoditization in tourism. For more on leisure and cultural capitalism, see also Bourdieu 53-56 and 179-80.

(18) The final volume was to be dedicated to the colonies; however, at the time the first TCI guidebook was published, Italy had just added Libya, Rhodes, and the Dodecanese to its colonial possessions. With its proclamation of a guidebook, it was clear that the TCI intended for these colonies to become tourist destinations from the outset (Pivato 126-27).

(19) On the relationship between guidebooks and the representation of "history," see Bova 65-70; Brusa 50-55; and Koshar 335-336.

(20) For primary sources, see Tegani; Touring Club Italiano, Guida d'Italia:possedimenti e colonie; and Touring Club Italiano, Guida breve: Italia meriodionale e insulare, Libia.

(21) In its insistence that its readers obey its suggestions (and be "good readers"), the guidebook opens up the possibility for "bad readers." If, as Althusser and Butler have argued, it is indeed the linguistic order that interpellates subjects in and through ideology and subjects who are not fully hailed take up positions as bad subjects, then we could posit that the grammar (or linguistic order) of the guidebooks produces both "good" and "bad" readers. The former become interpellated into touristic subject positions, while the latter refuse and ultimately trouble that identification. Both "tourists" and "readers" are "hailed into being," using the words of Althusser, vis-a-vis the deeply inscribed social practices that the guidebook advances in its narratives (Hom Cary 61-77).