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Epilogue: Messner Country

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2021

William Bainbridge
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Summary

Abstract

Disencumbered from their historical conditions and rehashed in different discursive patterns, symbols outlined in the previous chapters re-emerge today in the controversial debate on the cultural heritage of the Dolomites. This debate, critically revived after their inscription in the World Heritage List, subtly exploits these ‘neutral’ symbols when the economy of mass tourism and the internationalization of leisure appear to overshadow ethnic and national divides. Aspects of this most recent recirculation of symbols are presented through fieldwork conducted at the Messner Mountain Museums in South Tyrol. While perfectly aware of crossing multiple ethnic and political borders, Victorian travellers were, instead, mainly concerned with a picturesque version of the Dolomites that was translatable into their own language and heritage.

Keywords: heritage re-enactment, museums, global mountain heritage, visitor books, borderlands, Reinhold Messner

In the summer of 2010, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi acted as speaker for a 30-second TV spot to be broadcasted on the national television throughout the holiday season. The short advert, subsidized by the Italian Ministry of Tourism, had an institutional character and a propagandistic overtone:

What you see here is your Italy, a unique country, made of sky, sun, and sea, but also of history, culture and art; it is an extraordinary country that you still have to discover. Use your vacations to better know Italy – your magic Italy.

The slideshow accompanying the spot promoted the nation through a series of spectacular aerial views of Florence, Venice, Rome, as well as Capri, Portofino, Stupinigi, and the Greek temples of Sicily, ending with some triumphal closeups of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, located in fact in the Vatican City, a foreign country. In the political ambience of the time, sky, sun, sea, history, culture, and art were mobilized as ingredients of an internationally recognized landscape heritage, both natural and cultural, to mask the disputable reputation of a country vexed by media tycoons, sexual scandals, organized criminality, and political corruption (Ginsborg, 2004; Ginsborg & Asquer, 2011).

The spot was not criticized for its manipulative ideology, but because the chosen scenery did not include mountains.

Type
Chapter
Information
Topographic Memory and Victorian Travellers in the Dolomite Mountains
Peaks of Venice
 , pp. 237 - 254
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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