Tourists and meteorologists in the Italian Riviera: The Journal de Bordighera (1883–1935) as a source for the study of the local climate

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2021.01.007

Journal of Historical Geography

Volume 75, January 2022, Pages 24-41

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2021.01.007 Get rights and content

Highlights

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A British environmental bubble is still present in the Italian Riviera.
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A journal mondain can be an interesting source for historical climate studies.
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Climatological series are reconstructed and confirmed in their reliability.
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Meteorology can be an instrument of space mastering in tourist regions.

Abstract

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.

Section snippets

The origin of tourism in the Italian Riviera

Part of the tourist appeal of the westernmost reach of the Italian Riviera among the Northern and Eastern European upper and middle classes around the mid-nineteenth century was certainly its mild, sunny climate, especially when compared with other regions at the same latitude (44°N). According to the data provided by the Osservatorio di Imperia, the annual average temperatures of the Riviera are 16.1 °C (winter: 9.8 °C) mean, 13.0 °C (winter: 7.0 °C) minimum, and 19.1 °C (winter: 12.7 °C)

Bordighera and its british ‘environmental bubble’

Bordighera, a small town of fishermen and farmers at the heart of the Riviera, during the second half of the nineteenth century succeeded in becoming, in a few decades, a tourist destination of the first order for all Europe. This extraordinary success was initially due to the promotion provided by the novel Doctor Antonio (another medical doctor!) written in English by the Italian Giovanni Ruffini, and published in Edinburgh in 1855, which was widely distributed in Britain and motivated lot of

The historical weather stations of the Riviera

The middle of the nineteenth century was a very active period for the atmospheric sciences in the entire world, likewise in Italy, both scientists and politicians demonstrated a very strong interest in this promising discipline.³⁴

The quantitative data about the weather reported in the Journal de Bordighera

The Museum Bicknell of Bordighera does not have the entire collection of the Journal de Bordighera, but only the issues indicated in Table 1, with very limited gaps. Some single, scattered issues are at the Biblioteca delle Civiche Raccolte Storiche in Milan, and some others at the Fonds de la Société de Géographie housed at the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. The only entire collection is held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, but unfortunately, it cannot be

The reliability of the meteorological data in the Journal de Bordighera

The meteorological data sets contain interesting information that allow, on the one hand, the recognition of climatic variations in a given region and, on the other hand, the improvement of the understanding on the functioning of the climate and of the weather forecasts. To this end, however, it is important that the collected data have a high level of metro-meteorological, and historical reliability.⁴⁴

Some qualitative remarks about the weather from the Journal de Bordighera

The Journal de Bordighera is not only a rich source of quantitative data about the temperatures of the Riviera, but it also contains some interesting qualitative comments about the meteorological conditions. Interestingly, the majority of them were published after 1924, the year when the daily data were no longer reported in the journal. Around that date there appears to be a considerable, clear and sudden move of interest away from the objective numerical data towards subjective evaluative

Conclusions

In this paper, the reconstruction of a historic climatological series, even if incomplete, has, on the one hand, offered an unpublished amount of data which may prove useful for new research about the climate of Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. On the other hand, the rediscovery of these data has enlightened an original aspect of the social relationship between meteorologist and tourist activities, whereby the tourists are both collectors and beneficiaries of the climatic data, so that they

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not–for–profit sectors.

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