Tourism Development in South Tyrol

Utopian, Fascist Architecture: Tourism as a Strategic Investment in South Tyrol

The dissertation is dedicated to the interplay of tourism and fascism (especially forced Italianization) in South Tyrol from the 1920s to the 1940s. In this context, planned large-scale tourism projects are not understood as mere technical infrastructure, but as strategic investments and constructed fascist policies. The thesis focuses on the never realized large-scale project of a gigantic cable car from Cortina d'Ampezzo to Bolzano by Giòvanni Ponti and other actors and its framework conditions. The topic has a technical-historical aspect – the opening up of the Alps for car and sports tourists – and a media-historical one – the recoding of the mountains through new utopian images. Within this focus, the coupling of road, cable car, and hotel construction under fascism for new purposes – unlike the upper middle classes before World War I, motorists and athletes are now to travel en masse to the mountains – is debated. Hereby tourism is examined as utopian modernization and optimization of bodies, mountains and means of transport.