Two years ago, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead published a long article entitled “The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona,” which addressed some of the challenges of unrestricted tourism. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Barcelona kept drowning year after year from foreign visitors. Short-term rentals on Airbnb, often operated illegally, filled the city’s apartment buildings and squeezed local housing supplies. Barcelona’s main tourist attractions, including Park Güell and the Sagrada Familia church, were crowded with huge numbers of visitors.

In the summer of 2014, the demonstrators took to the streets to draw attention to the “pestilence of young visitors who came to Barcelona not to sample the local culture, but to stage internationally recognized tropes of celebration. ”Three years later, 60% of Barcelona’s residents said in a survey that the city had reached or exceeded its capacity to accommodate tourists.

Hating tourists is nothing new, as the Italian journalist Marco D’Eramo notes in “The World in a Selfie”, which was translated into English by Bethan Bowett-Jones and David Broder. Quoting an 1848 British magazine article, Mr D’Eramo laments that the advent of the railroad and steamboat, for all their merits, “has plagued our generation with a desperate evil; You covered Europe with tourists. “Adam Smith, in his” Wealth of Nations “(1776), accumulated mocking contempt for the fashion of young men who galloped across the continent on so-called grand tours.

First published in 2017, “The World in a Selfie” has been updated in this English-language edition to reflect the pandemic that suspended international travel for a year. Mr. D’Eramo highlighted the preeminent role tourism plays in the global economy and wisely notes that Covid has “demonstrated the centrality of tourism by leaving tourism out. After the end of this industry, not only airlines and shipping companies, but also aircraft manufacturers and shipyards were on the verge of bankruptcy. “The book“ An Examination of the Tourist Age ”is a bit incoherent, sometimes distracted from topic to topic and loses the thread in philosophical weeds. But in its more focused moments, “Selfie” makes for an exciting, provocative examination of an all too human pastime.

A recurring theme here is our futile search for the “authentic” through traveling. Mr D’Eramo saves his most biting comment for UNESCO and its “World Heritage” lists, which he compares to a “kiss of death”. “As soon as the label is attached,” he writes, “the life of the city is extinguished. it is ready for preparation. “This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but his comment on the unintended consequences of preservation is compelling.