This book asks the question; why is it that tourism matters? It looks at how it is we do tourism and learn to be tourists when we are on holiday. Tourism is a dynamic way of being that may facilitate or hinder intercultural exchange. The ways in which we do tourism and the places in which we are tourists raise practical, material and emotional questions about tourist life. These questions are at the heart of this book. This book draws on both empirical work and a range of theoretical frameworks, arguing that tourism matters precisely because of the lessons it can teach us about living everyday life with others.

Italia Romantica
 This book attempts to chart the vision of Italy as it was developed by the second generation English Romantic poets, influenced as they were by the malign influence of the Gothic novelists. It examines the influence of Italian writers in new English translations at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, especially on Byron, perhaps the most influential authority on Italy in his day.
It traces the awakening of a new historical awareness of an Italy apart from Rome and the Renaissance and the new use to which classical lore was put by poets as similar and yet so different as Keats and Leopardi. It examines the influence of new tourists, especially women, of landscape painting, of interests other than antiquarianism, it discusses social phenomena that influenced opinion, like lawlessness and the Roman Catholic Church. England greeted the Risorgimento with disbelief, given the poor opinion with which so many of her tourists returned from Italy, but with a sympathy born of the better knowledge of her situation that these same tourists had provided. Italy’s transformation from geographical expression to nation and acceptance in her new role as a European power was certainly helped by this long process of familiarisation.