Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea (Dec 2018)

Strategies of an Italian Spa Company at the Dawn of Mass Tourism. The Recovery of S.A. Terme e Grandi Alberghi di Sirmione in the Second Postwar Period

  • Riccardo Semeraro (1988) is research assistant of Economic History at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Brescia, Department of History and Philology. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and Management from the University of Verona in 2017. He is interested in the Late Modern and Contemporary Ages and, in particular, his research interests concern the history of firearms production, the history of tourism, industrial districts and clusters, as well as the socio-economic comparison of Italy and Spain.,
  • Maria Paola Pasini, Ph.D. in Economic History, is adjunct professor of Tourism History, Territorial Marketing and Marketing in SMEs at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan and Brescia. She is president of the Centro Studi e Documentazione “Giuseppe Bonelli” headquartered at the State Archives of Brescia, as well as member of both the Centro di Ricerca sulla Cultura e Narrazione del Viaggio (CENVI) and the scientific committee of the Archivio Storico della Resistenza Bresciana e dell’Età Contemporanea.

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 4
pp. 1 – 25

Abstract

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In the aftermath of WWII, the Italian tourism sector, as the rest of the national economy, had to undertake a complex and crucial phase of reconstruction. This essay investigates the second postwar period focusing on the case study of S.A. Terme e Grandi Alberghi di Sirmione. Using documentary material from different archives, the aim is to reconstruct the strategies adopted by the spa company to revive its tourism activities, contextualizing them in the developments of the Garda area. In a crucial phase, when western tourism was acquiring a mass dimension, the new shareholders started afresh from the reconstruction of the accommodation facilities following logics of diversification and innovation.

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