Sustainable Tourism Law

46 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW the improvement and expansion of tourist sites, which were financed through the establishment of the “Tourist tax” (or Visitor Tax, ‘ imposta di soggiorno ’). Within this frame, at the beginning of the century, a functional link between tourism and the hotel industry is created. This functional link certainly has a solid historical justification: there can be no tourism without hotel facilities. But this link will soon become the very limit of tourism policy in Italy, which for decades was largely seen almost exclusively through this perspective. The Great War, as every war, interrupted the process. Some say that between 1915 and 1945 tourism was done in gray-green uniforms, backpacks and rifles in hand. However, it shouldnot be forgotten that, even in the face of fierce contradictions, the impetus of the tourism industry did not diminish in the period between the two World Wars. In this period new laws related to tourism were promulgated: the Rdl 15 April 1926, no. 765 (Provvedimenti per la tutela e lo sviluppo dei luoghi di cura soggiorno e turismo –Measures for the protection and development of places of treatment, for stay and tourism) and Rdl 23 November 1936, no. 2523 (Norme per la disciplina delle agenzie di viaggio e turismo – Rules for travel and tourism agencies). As we can see, in the traditional attention to the regulation of the hotel industry, a “new” subject appears in the regulatory framework: the travel agency. Certainly, it is no exception to the regulation of travel agencies how the regime was interested in controlling travel – especially abroad – of Italians. Fascism discouraged expatriation and travel abroad. But it must be acknowledged that it created the structures and the opportunity for tourism within the Kingdom of Italy to become a mass phenomenon. We all remember the great Summer Colonies, one of the first forms of “organized mass travel”; or the special Sunday trains that millions of Italians used for one day vacations to the sea and, in particular, to the Italian Riviera. It must also be mentioned that in 1919, at the end of the first World War, ENIT – Ente nazionale italiano per il Turismo – the Italian National Agency for Tourism – was founded. Tourism in Italy after the II World War In the years after the Second World War, when Europe and the world sought to forget the horrors of the war, Italy suddenly found itself at the forefront of the international tourism industry, accompanied by a series of heterogeneous but concurrent events that, being an expression of a widespread interest for culture and history, attracted international tourism.