History and tourism : intertextual representations of Florence

The act of worldmaking involves various and complex representations that “produce” places, cultures, institutions, individuals, and heritages. The subject has emerged as a strong concept in the recent conceptuality of Tourism Studies/Tourism Sciences. In this review article, Staiff makes it clear that a lead heritage locale or tourist destination city like Florence (and visitors to Florence!) is (are) unavoidably ensnared in such practices. In this article, the reviewer explores the interrelationship between the various historical representations of the city, and in particular, the myth of Renaissance Florence and the recent revisionist constructions of the 15th century. It suggests that a process of intertextuality is at work in both “tourist Florence,” as a place, and in the way the visitor makes sense of the city within networks of meaning continually being created. Further, this review article explores the coincidence of Florence as a specular culture in the 15th century—one where everything is deemed to mirror everything else—and a tourist display culture in the 21st century and what this coincidence reveals about the role of representation in the past and the role of representation and worldmaking in the present through the mediating agency and authority of tourism, and its collaborative inscriptive industries.