In the eyes of the beholder. The tourist gaze and gender in 1950s Italian comedies

Italian “tourist comedies” of the 1950s, whether set in Italy or abroad, establish a sometimes metaphorical, sometimes metonymical connection between landscape and bodies, along the lines of what Giovanna Grignaffini pointed out in relation to post-war popular melodrama, and investigated in depth by Stephen Gundle in "Bellissima". In these comedies, the national landscape is to some extent “feminized” as a space of contemplation, an object of the gaze (and a product thereof); but it is also – and perhaps even more significantly – the space where an updated set of competences emerge for male characters, thus making tourism one of the activities that mould the complicated relationship between consumer culture, the modernization of the nation, and the new (or at least updated) gender roles of this decade.