The Boule-de-Neige and the Invisible Borders of Tourist’s Space

For decades, the exponential growth of mass tourism on a global scale has been highlighting a series of limitations and contradictions implicit in the governmental and administrative structure of the States. The hypothesis discussed here is that souvenirs, as hyper-iconic representations of the city and the tourist space, include the signs of the conflict, today strident, between citizens/owners and travelers/tourists. Both categories claim the right to the same space but with different needs, approaches, and intentions. Such a conflict is part of the larger one taking place between the 19th-century-born State and the transnational territory, between physical and virtual borders, between immobility and movement, between perspective and narration. A souvenir such as the boule-de-neige, historically framed here and analyzed as an urban representation in the context of the mass-media and artistic production of 20th century, appears prophetically and ambiguously capable of combining and expressing the factors of the ongoing conflict. Developed from the iconographic tradition of the Grand Tour, the boule-de-neige belongs to a heterogeneous family of devices produced according to the growing expectations of mass tourism. The need to condense the icon of a landscape as it is conceived of by the tourists fostered the production of a souvenir that hybridizes perspective-based device with sculpture and, through textual and visual artifices, manages to embody the memory of experience offering also a bodily and temporal interaction. At the same time, it prophetically embodies the conflict between different, conflictive ideas of ​​landscape and materializes the very concept of the invisible border between two domains, the residents’ and the tourists’ one, with all the nuances and ambiguities that it entails.