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The Italian Riviera was, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the Second World War, one of the most famous, elitist, climatic, winter, international tourist destinations. In Bordighera, in particular, the British community was so important that a typical English 'environmental bubble' was created, and still today there is not only physical, but also cultural evidence of it. Among the latter, the polyglot Journal de Bordighera (1883–1935), a large number of issues of which are still held at the local Museum Bicknell, is the privileged witness of the carefree life of the tourists spending their winter on the Riviera in that period. One of its weekly columns, the 'Bulletin Météorologique', contains precise data, collected by the tourists themselves, about the temperatures of the resort, while comments on the special climate of the region are scattered across different issues. That information is unique for Bordighera because, even if the location has always been appreciated for its mild climate, surprisingly no other meteorological data have ever been recorded for such a long period. The aim of this paper is twofold: to reconstruct this historical climatological series, which appears to have reasonable historical reliability, if verified with the series of other weather stations of the Riviera, and to consider the observations about the climate published by the tourist meteorologists on the Journal de Bordighera as a positioned way to observe and to narrate the climate of the Riviera. • A British environmental bubble is still present in the Italian Riviera. • A journal mondain can be an interesting source for historical climate studies. • Climatological series are reconstructed and confirmed in their reliability. • Meteorology can be an instrument of space mastering in tourist regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to introduce a method for analysing a specific kind of contemporary tourism positioned between two different traditional customs: visiting museums and going to pilgrimage sites. The case studies provided are focused on Italian shrine museums where it is difficult to ascertain whether visitors are cultural tourists or pilgrims or a combination of both. Regardless, the tourist flows and networks created by Italian shrine museums can provide promising elements for local development. Four case studies that are representative of different regions in Northern Italy and have specific features in common have been chosen: shrines dedicated to the Holy Virgin; museums that exhibit different types of objects; and smaller museums and shrines. The case studies are the Shrine of the Madonna delle Grazie in Garessio (Piedmont), the Madonna del Bosco Shrine in Imbersago (Lombardy), the Madonna della Misericordia Shrine in Genoa (Liguria) and, the Santuario delle Grazie in Rimini (Emilia Romagna). Each of the case studies is significant not only for how it illustrates both the different ways in which shrines and museums can be connected, but also how they impact on the cultural enhancement of the territory. The method we illustrate also makes it possible to evaluate different kinds of connections between other tourism institutions and experiences, with the aim of introducing well-defined actions capable of enhancing tourist experiences elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The slow tourism philosophy is usually directed, on the one hand, at mature tourist destinations with the aim of renewing them with up-to-date sustainable and responsible elements and, on the other hand, at promising destinations in order to help them enter today's extremely competitive tourism market. The Roia Valley, which since 1860 has been partly Italian and partly French, is the natural link between the maritime tourist region of the Riviera and the Côte d'Azur in the South, and the mountain resorts of Piedmont in the North, but it is not an important tourist destination per se. Nonetheless, since the 1920s a very interesting railway has crossed the Roia Valley. This railway line, destroyed during the Second World War and entirely restored in 1979, has mainly been used for local transport or to connect the seaside with Piedmont, but it has not yet been exploited for local tourism. The aim of this research is to see to what extent a tourist exploitation of the railway line, through a slow tourism programme, could transform the promising Roia Valley into a new tourist destination closely connected to the mature Riviera and Piedmont regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]