Translating Italian tourism in the 1930s: institutional tourist communication targeting foreign visitors

This chapter sets out to introduce an ongoing study on Italian institutional tourism promotion in English, from the beginnings of ENIT (the Italian National Tourism Promotion Agency) in 1919 to the present day. Since the early 1920s English has increasingly established itself as an international language, for this reason the study of Italian institutional tourism commu-nication in English over the past 100 years appears particularly important in order to understand its evolution over time. The present chapter focuses on a case study and considers tourism promotion strategies in a multilingual magazine published in the 1930s, during the Fascist regime in Italy. Drawing on a com-parative textual-linguistic multimodal analysis of some issues of Italia, one of ENIT’s early official magazines published in Italian, French, German and English, this investigation has tried to shed light on ENIT’s early communicative strategies and translation issues. The 1930s is a key period in the history of tourism pro-motion of Italy. This chapter argues that, on the one hand those years were highly charged from a political and a promotional point of view, as the Fascist regime was determined to renew the image of Italy abroad and to support the tourism industry by attracting foreign visitors from key countries. On the other hand, ENIT had been founded before the black shirt takeover in Italy and outlived the regime and hence the communicative approach of those years cannot be solely framed in connection to the autarchic, totalitarian regime ideology and propaganda.