Paolo Iommelli, The tourist

Until the first half of the twentieth century, tourism was still a phenomenon of elité, which affected certain sections of the population because they had availability of time and money. Later, between the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, with the greater diffusion of industrialization and urbanization in Europe and North America, tourism conquered the middle and popular classes and summer-summer tourism became established. As a consequence, tourism has assumed in the developed countries the current characteristics of mass phenomenon, expression of a new socio-economic fabric. Each citizen of a developed country, therefore, becomes a potential tourist because, both for fashion and for decision aware, he has the right to use his free time under a different sky than the usual one. If the journeys were “sacred” for ancient civilizations, they also become modern holidays (the term holiday derives from holy-day, sacred day) but only because the sacredness is (uniquely) equivalent.