Riva del Garda marks a century of tourism imagery around Lake Garda

The Museo Alto Garda (MAG), housed in the medieval Rocca fortress in Riva del Garda, is presenting the exhibition "Visitate il Garda" through October 18, exploring how Lake Garda was shaped in the collective imagination as a tourist destination. The museum occupies a moated stronghold at the lake's northern tip, a setting that adds resonance to its subject matter.

The show marks the centenary of a local tourism promotion campaign launched in 1926 under the slogan "Visitate il Garda," one of the earliest organized efforts to market the lake's image to Italian and foreign travelers alike. Through vintage posters, photographs and archival documents, the exhibition traces how this promotional venture helped forge a desirable, standardized and reproducible landscape long before social media and today's mass tourism.

The exhibition's title, "L'invenzione del paesaggio" (the invention of landscape), underscores its curatorial premise: the Garda that visitors perceive today — elegant resort life, turquoise waters, mountain backdrops — is not a natural given but a cultural and commercial construction gradually built up over the 20th century. Italy's largest lake long attracted an aristocratic and bourgeois clientele before becoming a mass tourist destination after World War II.

Drawing on local tourism archives, the MAG questions the making of images that still circulate today in guidebooks and advertising campaigns. The exhibition thus invites visitors to reconsider what contemporary viewers take for granted as landscape, revealing the aesthetic and economic choices that shaped it a century ago.

---

Written by the ADM desk based on Exibart. Read the original article for the full story.