From France to Italy, a holiday history

14 may

When you get to talk with dutch people past certain age and, lets say, middle class, pretty much all of them have spend holidays in France as kids. Actually, a bunch of them have parents that bought a house in some middle of nowhere town. Yet most of these people nowadays is not coming back to their childhood haunts, but is going to Italy. Why would that be? 

Of course, one could easily imagine that it is all about simply enlargement of the home range. After all France is about half a day riding, and Italy a couple. So nowadays, better cars, better highways than back in the sixties, Italy is suddenly in available range. Your parents expend two days in the road with you in the back seat to get to their cottage in Provence, you spend two days in the road, with your own kids, to get to eat real polenta in Verona. It could also be that you got tired of the same little towns with terraces and wine, so you exchanged them for little towns with piazas and pizzas. 

Yet it could very well be that in the shared european imaginary, the chic and aspirational france has been substituted by the friendly and honestly messy Italy? 

Of course, all this is recent history, and I am nothing closer to an historian. I am not even european. Yet I do live in (more or less) north europe, and enjoy believing that I can identify the ideas that shape my friends movements. Or their gossips, their dreams and their nightmares. I think that people does go to places that feel confortable for them, that feel correct. I remember a diving partner telling me that, alas! he would not dive again in Greece, due to the corruption of their government. Or another, a fairly shady baron of a dutch construction company, telling me about his repulsion for the corruption of the egyptian authorities, never mind his own shady business here at home. 

So then, turning these and some other ideas in my head, I started wondering. What if in the postwar and the sixties, and even the seventies France was a bit a model of naughtiness, of charme and style? What if De Gaulle defying Nato actually strike some note of envy in the by nature anarchic dutch, whom at the moment were totally in love with the USA? What if the whole thing of going to France was some sort of aspirational dream of the boring north european, aiming at learning some wine tasting and rising his humdrum existence towards de nouvelle vague and a gitane hanging from the lips? And then... now that it is fairly clear that France is not quite the model to follow as society, nor as economy, now that the north of europe has been fairly successful in creating not only stability but also welfare, now that Berlin has a better fame than Paris for going out… maybe now is the moment when traveling to the messy Italy feels right, instead of traveling to France. Because is not only the naughtiness of the relaxed and messy Italian ways what appeals the dutch today... perhaps is the possibility of flaunting their success. The possibility of coming back and say, with some sort of self satisfied sight... I am so happy to be back home. NO need to aspire to anything anymore, we got it already.

So! I have produced a model to explain a pattern, which, after all, is what I have been trained for, first as a budding physicist (that never quite blossomed, ahem ahem) and then as a biologist. Now, models are not good by explaining the past, but rather, to predict the future. 

Prepare yourself, english. Your one industry left with a chance of success, then, is tourism.