Tourist Photographers and the Promotion of Travel: the Polytechnic Touring Association, 1888–1939

The Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA) was a London-based, originally philanthropic turned commercial travel firm whose historical origins coincided with the arrival of the Kodak camera in 1888 – thus, of popular (tourist) photography. This article examines the PTA’s changing relationship with tourist photographers, and how this influenced the company’s understanding of what role photography could play in promoting the tours, in the late nineteenth and early twenty century. This inquiry is advanced on the basis of the observation that, during this time, the PTA’s passage from viewing tourists as citizens to educate, to customers to please, paralleled the move from using photography-based images to mixed media. Such a development was certainly a response to unprecedented market demands; this article argues that it should also be considered in relation to the widening of photographic perceptions engendered by the democratization of the medium, to which the PTA responded, first as educator, then as service provider. In doing so, the article raises several questions about the shifting relationship between “high”, or established, and “low”, or emerging, forms of culture, as mass photography and the mass marketing of tourism developed

a multi scalar approach to long term dynamics spatial relations and economic networks of roman secondary settlements in italy and the ombrone valley system southern tuscany towards a model

In Roman landscapes, the particular sites defined as secondary settlements (also known as vici/villages, minor centres, agglomerations secondaires and/or stationes/mansiones) have played an 'intermediary' role between the cities and other rural structures (villae/farms), linked to medium- and long-distance economic and commercial trajectories. The aim of this paper is to apply a multi-scalar approach to model their long-term spatial relationships and connectivity with the Mediterranean exchange network. On the macro-scale, we have analysed a sample of 219 reviewed sites to understand the diachronic trends and spatial dynamics of attraction/proximity to significant elements of the landscape such as towns, roads, rivers and coastline. The Ombrone Valley (Tuscany, Italy) represents a micro-scale case study of a complex system, in which the imported pottery (amphorae, African Red Slip ware, ingobbiata di rosso) found in the vicus/mansio of Santa Cristina in Caio, the Roman villa of La Befa and the town of Siena (Saena Iulia) provided diagnostic 'macroeconomic' perspectives. The results show how the secondary settlements occupied a nodal position in the Roman landscape in terms of resilience (long period of occupation until the Early Middle Ages) and spatial organization with a close relationship to natural and anthropic infrastructures and trade functions linked to Mediterranean routes