ABSTRACT
The way we view tourist landscapes – whether as nineteenth-century shipboard travellers or as twenty-first-century deplaners desperate to be back on our mobile phones – is heavily conditioned by notions that we have of imagined, historically created and appropriate landscape settings. In heritage-conservation literature the landscape setting of a building has been referred to as curtilage (Heritage Office 1996), and this concept may be applied in diverse tourism environments. Venice, one of the world’s most depicted tourist landscapes, retains its intimate fifteenth-century setting. We know and expect that the structures are surrounded by canals and the Adriatic – and that the series of views from the vaporetto or the gondola, or the grand vistas from the Piazza San Marco, are modulated landscapes with known, even anticipated, curtilages. These curtilages are created for us not just by the buildings and the efforts of municipal conservationists, but by Renaissance paintings, by novels, by photographs and by decades of appropriation in romantic advertisements and films.
