Italy has long been a commodity produced for and consumed by tourists. This "destination Italy" is a touristic imaginary that exerts a powerful hold over perceptions of Italy and Italianness circulating in the global cultural imagination. The conversation will show a combination of historical research and ethnographic field visits to investigate how and why the idea of Venice has come to exert significant power over Italy's tourist imagination.

Stephanie Malia Hom is Associate Professor of Transnational Italian Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on modern Italy and the Mediterranean, mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, migration and detention, and tourism history and practice. She is the author of Empire's Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy's Crisis of Migration and Detention (Cornell, 2019) and The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy (Toronto, 2015). Her essays and articles have been published in wide range of venues, including the leading journals in the fields of Italian studies, tourism history, urban studies, and folklore. She has also worked as a journalist in the U.S. and Europe.