‘Paesaggi sotto la Cupola’. Il globo di neve come espressione dell’esperienza turistica / ‘Landscapes under glass. The snow globe as expression of tourism experience

The current virtualization of the landscape experience, fuelled by the accessibility of georeferenced navigation services and the ease of reproducing and disseminating digital images, brings about the indirect recovery of approaches and devices that have fallen into neglect, and which may now seem to possess more narrative and revelatory potential than more sophisticated tools. “Snow globes” belong to a massive and heterogeneous group of media produced to meet the growing expectations of mass tourism. The need to condense a landscape icon into a few cubic centimetres favoured the production of souvenirs going beyond the proto-photographic metaphor of the window, proposed by Alberti, and appears to prophetically embody the very idea of landscape, contributing to the consolidation of the concept. Moving the outside point of view within the globe, artists and landscape designers have more recently explored the current potential both to narratively frame their designs and to reveal the invisible thresholds with other dimensions.