Monuments in the Seashore: The Italian experience of “colonie di vacanza”, 1930-1960

This paper concerns a new type of buildings, called “colonie di vacanza”, appeared in the Italian coasts during the Thirties. The objective is to show the typological organization and the original architectural issues of Italian “colonie di vacanza” (here translated as “holiday colonies”) as outcomes of the educational programs and as a reflect of changing ideas about coastal landscape. These extraordinary shaped buildings were conceived for the holidays of children, temporary separated from their family and taken to a healthy place, where they could expose themselves to the benefits of marine water, fresh air and sunlight. This experience was developed from the middle of the 19th century to the last decades of the 20th century. Medicine, Propaganda, Pedagogy, and Leisure are the key words of an extraordinary experience of tourism that involved many generations of Italian people. As a social phenomenon, the Holiday Camps are not especially Italian: as they are a direct outcome of industrial society, they are diffused in many countries. But the Italian experience is characterized by the quality of its architectures, representing a real field of experimentation. In the Italy of the fascist regime, the holiday colonies experience was over its original starting point - the fighting against the tuberculosis and the development of a moral pedagogy against the diffusion of the socialist thought among young proletarian people -, and it was characterized by the specificity of the social program and by the quality of its architectural issues. After sketching out the three times that characterized the Italian experience – the battle against tuberculosis before WW1, the “colonie di vacanza” as a propaganda tool in the Thirties, and the discovery of education by leisure in the Sixties -, the paper shows the typological organization of Italian Holiday Camps during the Thirties as an outcome of the educational programmes, and its original architectural issues as a reflect of changing ideas about coastal landscape. The actual key words that describe the holiday colonies experience during the Thirties are neither Leisure nor Medicine, but Propaganda. The text analyses the relationship among the “colonie di vacanza” and the great investment on children’s holidays as a way to strengthen social consensus made by the fascist regime, the image of modernity transmitted by their architectural shapes, the different kinds of architectural references that we can recognize in the buildings (the iconography of imperial rhetoric of arch and columns; the search for the expression of industrial culture; the transfiguration of buildings in “mechanical toys” (giochi meccanici); the references to Modern Architecture); and finally their relationship with the natural landscape. Once isolated Monuments in the Seashore, and now enigmatic presences in the contemporary tourist resorts, the Italian Holiday Colonies manifest the search for a positive relationship with landscape at the time of Modernity, but they also question the future relationships among City, Sea and Human Life.