Leisure Travel: A Sociological Lifestyle

“It is very difficult, in geography as in morality, to understand the world without leaving one's own home” -Voltaire-

Today, depending on free time and financial resources, travel is a habit for many, or rather, for those who can afford it. This wasn't the case in the past. How and when did travel become important in organizing leisure time? Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Great Britain, the practice of going to the seaside became widespread , thanks to medical prescriptions to cure melancholy and depression , the famous " spleen " praised by Baudelaire. Obviously, it was a prerogative of the wealthy. In Italy, the 50s and 60s saw people enjoying vacations, essentially thanks to two factors: the economic boom (or economic miracle) and the right to paid leave proclaimed in Article 36 of the Constitution. In that period, vacations represented a socio-cultural, personal, and familial achievement (households traveled en masse).

Matter of time

Day and night, weekends, weeks, months: these are just a few classifications that allow people to articulate and structure their existence. From a sociological perspective, how can we define time and travel? Time is a social and cultural institution; it coordinates human activity (Gasparini, 1994). The capitalist production system has determined the dichotomies of work time / non-work time and individual time / collective time . Every society tends to construct temporal frameworks that give meaning to everyday life and social systems (Belloni, 1986), just as individuals use strategies to manage their moments. There is a physical-natural time marked by biological and astronomical rhythms; there is also a socially deformed time, structured by societies based on rules, orientations, modes of production, values, and group needs (Gasparini, 1990; 1994). In Western culture, time is correlated to five types of conception (D'Addante, 2011): 1) quantitative; 2) efficiency (commodification of time); 3) valorization of speed; 4) planning; 5) flexibility. According to Bauman (2008), time within liquid modernity could only be pointillist, characterized by fragmentation, multitude, and instantaneity. In the opinion of sociologist Domenico De Masi (2000), people are moving towards a society no longer based on work, but on leisure activities.

An intercultural tourism

Travel is a historical-cultural category. It recalls the concepts of freedom ed otherness compared to the starting point. Moving plays a role in breaking the routine intended, according to anthony giddens (1990), as an integral part of both the continuity of the subject in carrying out daily activities and of the institutions. The tourism industry transforms environments, landscapes, natural resources, material and immaterial culture of a given context (Sgroi, 1988). Potentially every place can become a tourist attraction: not only cities of art, maritime, mountain and lake areas: small local realities, in fact, are gaining more and more visibility in contrast to the phenomenon of globalization (Savelli, 2008; 2011). When there is a contamination between local communities and global communities, we speak of intercultural tourismThe motivations that lead to travel are many: relaxation, leisure, business, religious reasons, cultural interests (Toscano, 1999).

What functions does tourism fulfill?

Here are the main ones (Dalla Chiesa, 1980):

1) compensatory, against the hardships of work and what is missing in the usual places where one lives;
2) alternative, that is, rest, leisure;
3) symbolizes, everyone moves, not just those belonging to an elite, thus a transition towards social equality takes place.

I would add a further implication represented by the use of social media : by sharing photographs of the places visited, the subject allows visualization to a virtual/real audience, reducing distances, providing information and stimuli. Furthermore, there are two theories based on the authenticity and inauthenticity of travel: on the one hand, mass tourism is equivalent to a cultural standardization intended for simple consumers ( inauthentic experience ) (Boorstin 1964; Ritzer and Liska, 1999; Coleman and Crang, 2002); on the other hand, on the contrary, detachment from everyday life determines an authentic experience (McCannell, 1973) in which the tourist-traveler attributes importance to the subjective experience, in everything he experiences directly through the performance of his itinerary (Savelli, 2011). Travel, tourism and culture continuously intersect, generating new lifestyles and habits; In fact, travelling involves the mobilisation of people, material objects (for example, suitcases, animals, means of transport, food, clothes, etc.) and immaterial objects (images, ideologies, religious beliefs, interrelationships between visitors and guests, etc.), generating a multi-layered movement (Sheller and Urry, 2004) that is constantly evolving.

Arianna Caccia