Guidebooks and Travel Stories Interpretations and Emotional

International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities
Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013), pp. 123-134
www.irssh.com
ISSN 2248-9010 (Online), ISSN 2250-0715 (Print)
Guidebooks and Travel Stories Interpretations and
Emotional Reactions
Armando Montanari
Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies
Sapienza Rome University
Piazzale A. Moro n.5, 00185 Roma, Italy
E-mail: armando.montanari@uniroma1.it
(Received: 7-11-12 / Accepted: 13-12-12)
Abstract
On the face of it, guidebooks and travel stories are two different resources. The former are
published to give travellers verified factual information. The latter are the work of poets and
writers who have gone on a journey, and who draw freely from history, facts and events to
describe their feelings about a particular work of art, rather than its place in world history and
culture. However, guidebooks and travel stories both place themselves between the tourist and
a tourist sight to provide the required explanations, and then end up steering the sightseeing
visit. These resources are extremely important for visitors, who use them to prepare the trip
and during the journey, and later to remember the trip once they have returned home. They
orient the deepest feelings of the user, who is led to relive the feelings experienced by writers
of travel stories and professional guidebook authors. This paper examines a particular aspect
of the tourist experience – the tourist gaze, which can develop, in some pathological
conditions, into a tourist syndrome such as Stendhal syndrome in Florence, Jerusalem
syndrome and those brought on by other holy places, and Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto.
Keywords: Tourist gaze, tourist syndrome, Stendhal syndrome, Hesse syndrome.
1. Introduction
The first thing that strikes anyone leafing through guidebooks and travel stories is how many
of them there are, and how different they are, in scope if nothing else. The former have
always tended to be clear-cut, starting from the 19th century, when Murray and Baedeker
came up with a recognisable style, shape, size and colour for their respective guidebooks to
allay the uncertainty of travel and give the tourist precise information on where to go, how to
get there, what to see and, above all, how to see it. Travel stories are precisely the opposite:
they have no common overall objective, and they provide a means for all writers who can
publish an account of their travels to communicate with readers. Some writers indicate in the
title that theirs is a travel story; others do not, as physical journeys overlap in their writing
with journeys of the mind and cultural or emotional travel experiences. Nevertheless, all these
publications have something in common.
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Guidebooks and travel stories have traditionally been a very important part of tourism, acting
as intermediaries between tourist sights and users. Their intermediation is anything but
amorphous: it is so full of life and meaning that it creates a sort of filter, either positive or
negative, capable of determining the tourist’s culture. Their function has been partially
transformed by the rapid market spread of information and communications technology.
However, while print has been partly replaced by digital, and therefore the instrument of
communication has changed, there has been no radical change in the cultural values that are
transmitted. The key element remains the relationship between the tourist, the natural or
cultural attraction the tourist wishes to visit and the community that is both architect and
result of that particular attraction. Hence the issue is not the instrument of communication so
much as the reasons for which the tourist travels. The theory of motivation – including tourist
motivations – suggests a hierarchy of individual needs that develop from material and
spiritual needs, based on the concept that all individuals aspire, or should aspire to, selfrealisation. Guidebooks and travel stories respectively transmit a mirror image of the ‘before’
and ‘after’ phases of a journey – the information, feelings and sensory experiences that
contribute to self-realisation through the sight of a cultural attraction, be it a painting, a
sculpture or a historical centre. Over the past twenty years, the introduction of ICT tools into
tourism has transferred researchers’ attention from content to tools. Gavalas and Kenteris
(2011) point to academic interest in mobile tourist guides over the past decade. But while the
personalisation of service has been examined, the system’s ability to exploit the information,
behaviour, evaluations and feelings of other tourists with similar interests has attracted scant
attention. Meanwhile, tourists are playing an increasingly active part in the process of
producing content through social networks, blogs and wikis, where they can now publish the
outcomes and impressions of their trips, no longer subjected to space and time constraints.
These ways to travel are increasingly widespread, and augur that we will have to calibrate a
demand for what we can define as “mobile tourism” in the near future (Kenteris, Gavalas and
Economu, 2011). This paper draws on the results of two European projects to which the
author has contributed: setting up a “Multimedia and Geographical Information System-based
Tourism Applications Authoring System” for the ESPRIT project (1993-95) and the
“Lunigiana multimedia tourism information system”, financed as part of the Objective 2 stage
of Italian government development initiatives for areas suffering industrial decline (19961999). In the former case the objective was to build a multimedia platform for tourism. In the
second, a website with GIS software was built to help visitors plan a trip to Lunigiana, an area
on the border between Tuscany and Liguria, and serve as an electronic tourist guide during
their stay. This paper uses only the results of research on the cultural and psychological
content of information as perceived by tourism demand over a constant transition period from
the 19th century to our day, i.e. before the digital innovations that are destined to totally
replace information on paper, and draws on the identification, within these projects, of such
key elements in guidebooks as could usefully be carried over to the multimedia tool. From
these studies (Baracchini et al, 1996; Bracci et al., 1997; Mogorovich & Montanari, 1993;
Montanari, 2010), this paper extrapolates the sections on the interpretation of the
psychological characteristics of demand, which could be the reference element for the logical
design of the information system. The elements taken into consideration concern the most
stimulating part of the relationship between the tourist and the tourist attraction – the part that
involves the observer’s mind most intensely. The tourist’s brain is so positively influenced by
the tourist experience as to be stressed by it, activating stimuli that will make the trip a unique
and unrepeatable experience. The tools capable of facilitating this process are numerous and
varied, in terms of quantity and quality. This article examines the intermediary role of
guidebooks and travel stories in tourism in two cities, Florence and Kyoto, which are quite
similar for the wealth of their cultural heritage and the exceptional nature of the experience
they offer, and yet geographically distant and culturally different.
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2. Selected Methodological References: The Tourist Gaze and the
Tourist Syndrome
Several fields including medicine, psychology, philosophy, sociology and geography have
contributed to giving the “gaze” a meaning relevant for tourism. Between 1936 and 1960,
psychologist Jacques Lacan (Miller, 1991) developed the theory of the mirror stage based on
two concepts, the body and its reflected image, which introduce the psychoanalytical term
“gaze”, indicating how a subject can lose a sense of autonomy upon realising that he or she is
a visible object. Lacan (Miller, 1981) introduces the concept of the gaze and describes it in
“the mirror stage” of an infant’s psychological development. He considers the gaze an
important element of the dialectic between the “ideal-ego”, the imagined self-image, and the
“ego-ideal”, the imaginary gaze of another person looking at the “ideal-ego”. It is easy to go
from interpreting success in a professional activity to the concept of the gaze as an instrument
and means of social promotion, and the achievement of one’s objectives through travel and
tourism. There has long been an element of social emulation in the tourism sector, as Shaw
and Williams (2002) and Plog (Montanari, 2010) point out.
French philosopher Foucault (1976) examines the development of the medical profession.
The central element of his work is the “medical gaze”, a term used to highlight the
dehumanizing medical separation of the patient’s identity from the patient’s body. Foucault
considers that the patient shows visible symptoms of his illness, and the doctor must see
beyond what he is shown to organise appropriate treatment. The patient is therefore a
necessary element for the doctor, as he manifests the signs of his illness on his body. Foucault
specifies that “the order of the disease is simply a ‘carbon copy’ of the world of life; the same
structures govern each, the same forms of division, the same ordering. [...] In disease one
recognises (reconnaît) life because it is on the law of life that knowledge (connaissance) of
the disease is also based.” In the 1980s, when tourism was trying to recover from the crisis of
the previous decade, it looked to research for elements of innovation to recover a seemingly
lost demand. Tourism scholars turned to psychology to find the inspiration required to
enhance mechanisms capable of satisfying the human ego through tourism.
Sociologist John Urry (1990) begins his account of tourism with Michel Foucault (1963),
particularly the passage in which Foucault points out the change in the doctor’s gaze – no
longer bound by the narrow grid of structure, it grasps colours, variations and tiny anomalies.
From the outset Urry affirms that his subject is not the “medical gaze”, but rather the “tourist
gaze”, which is “about consuming goods and services which are in some sense unnecessary”.
The gaze is not an absolute concept; it depends on the way it is interpreted in different
historical and social contexts, to which the tourist information provided in guidebooks and
travel stories has certainly contributed. Urry (1990, pg. 2) points out that “the gaze therefore
presupposes a system of social activities and signs which locate the particular tourist
practices, not in term of some intrinsic characteristics, but through the contrasts implied with
non-tourist social practices, particularly those based within the home and paid work”. Shaw
and Williams (2002) remind us that the tourist gaze is built on the basis of significant signs
and elements of the landscape. Tourists are great collectors of these signs, which are filtered
through to them by a dense network of information – in part exclusively cultural, but also
messages aimed at creating and marketing touristic places. To paraphrase Urry, it can be said
that the tourist gaze results from the overlapping of a number of motivations and curiosity
related to history, culture, the nature of places and the experience of each tourist. To this end,
Urry classifies touristic places according to three dichotomies – three types of tourism
resources. There are tourist resources that are the result of a romantic or collective gaze, but
they can also be historical or contemporary, or simply true or false resources, hence built from
nothing. The creation of unreal images charged with signs and meanings are the instruments
that many tourists create for themselves, the better to escape their daily routine. Tourism that
is attracted by cultural heritage prevalently uses the attraction in itself as a resource. Nor can
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one underestimate the powerful social metaphor of the cultural attraction as a means to
represent the relationship of the visitor to his own history and the history of other cultures, as
Lumley suggests (1988) in reference to museums.
The term “syndrome” comes from a Greek word meaning “concurrence”, meaning a group of
symptoms that together are characteristic of a specific illness, psychological disorder or other
abnormal condition. Used near-exclusively in medicine until the end of the 1980s, the term
has since been widely used and abused, spread by the media and employed in the most
different contexts. Tourism has borrowed concepts relating to two syndromes, the Stendhal
and Jerusalem syndromes, from medicine. These two terms were used for the first time by
doctors who identified in patients admitted to their hospitals symptoms caused by the
emotions and perceptions of tourists faced with a work of art, a building of particular beauty
or an ancient city with particular religious significance.
The syndrome manifests itself in people who already have a psychological illness or are
predisposed to it, as well as psychologically fragile and particularly sensitive or emotional
people. Even tourists who do not fall into these categories are undoubtedly exposed to
particular emotional strain because of the very meaning of tourism as an activity capable of
satisfying the greatest human expectations.
Initially experienced by few people, tourism has become a mass phenomenon over the past
century; as a result, syndromes too are more widespread, and have been surveyed and studied.
“I am not born for any one corner of the universe,” Seneca (2007 edition) writes in one of his
letters to his friend Lucilius; “this whole world is my country.” He contradicts himself in
another letter in which he says travel is useless; however, the letter offers useful insights into
some of the problems of society at the time. Seneca tells Lucilius that many people undertake
extremely long journeys with the sole objective of ridding themselves of their worries. His
words identify for us the problems that travel creates for individuals with psychological
difficulties – the longing for possession, explosions of anger, the throes of love and heaviness
of mind. In these same pages, Seneca also touches on a concept that is related to some extent
to the tourist gaze, when he says that travel “holds our attention for a moment by a certain
novelty, as children pause to wonder at something unfamiliar”. Hall and Page (1999) have
rightly emphasised the importance of the work of scholars who have studied human
motivation, starting from Maslow (1954), in understanding the psychology of the tourist.
People travel in order to experience strong emotions that allow them to find themselves.
Mitchell (1983) developed a classification model in the United States with nine types; people
at the higher levels, defined as inner-directed, are tourists who seek stimulating experiences
through self-reflection and self-interrogation. McNulty placed 38 per cent of UK tourists in
this category in the 1980s. Such high percentages certainly indicate an interest and a
predisposition that are only pathological in a small percentage of people. Recent thinking
about Maslow’s pyramid has led to the idea that on reaching the highest level the pyramid is
turned upside down, as on a mirror, to grow towards other levels of solely psychological
need. The classic tourist attraction “cannot be moved, transported or reproduced”. In
reference to tourism on the island of Capri, Staniscia (2006) points out that “the faraglioni are
rock formations, and hence a geological entity, but over time their constitution has been
enriched by intangible elements, of sound (waves breaking), light (sunrise and sunset) and
even feelings (the memory of intense happiness).” “Literature, theatre, cinema and television
have taken possession of these values and transmitted them through the collective
imagination” – and therefore other famous touristic places such as Venice and Florence, and
even Kyoto, could certainly contain the presuppositions for a possible tourist syndrome.
International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013), 123-134
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3. Florence: From Stendhal Syndrome to Hesse Syndrome
On 22 January 1817, Stendhal, just over thirty at the time, writes of his heart beating faster as
he came down the Apennine passes on his way to Florence and waited for the shape of the
city with all its buildings and monuments, its past and culture, to be outlined against the
horizon. On arriving at the gate of San Gallo, he was so full of emotion “that I would happily
have embraced the first inhabitant of Florence I met”. He sets out to visit Florence armed with
two guidebooks purchased from a bookseller. In the church of Santa Croce, Stendhal visits
the tombs of great men such as Alfieri, Michelangelo and Galileo, who seem to him untamed
by the emptiness of death. He writes: “I was in a sort of ecstasy at the idea of being in
Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen… I had reached that emotional state
in which we experience the celestial feelings that only the beauties of art and sentiments of
passion can offer. Upon leaving Santa Croce, my heart was beating irregularly, life was
ebbing out of me and I went onwards in fear of swooning.” Psychologist Graziella Magherini
(1989, 2007) studied this physical state of distress – a fear of fainting, going mad or even
dying – and gave it a name: Stendhal syndrome. The term provides a definition for brief,
unexpected and severe episodes of psychic disturbance lasting from a few hours to a few
days. From July 1977 to December 1986, these symptoms were observed and studied in 106
foreign visitors who had left their own country in perfect health and were then admitted to the
Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence for treatment. Magherini distinguished three types of
symptoms: 1) disorders of thought (changes in the perception of sounds or colours,
hallucinations, a delirious perception of the external reality, feelings of persecution or guilt
and fear); 2) emotional disorders (depressive anxiety and feelings of inferiority and
worthlessness or, on the contrary, feelings of superiority, euphoria, exultation and omnipotent
thinking); 3) panic attacks and somatised anxiety (fear of dying or going mad, somatic
projections of anguish, chest pains, arrhythmia and visual disorders). The control group study
examined 295 representative tourists in a stratified sample of the overall tourist population in
Florence in 1987, classified by country of origin and gender, on the basis of the number of
tourists in the city in 1985 (Magherini, 1989; 2007). Magherini calls herself a “passionate
reader (since childhood) of Stendhal”; what she likes about Stendhal is that he was a tourist
with a modern soul, a sentimental traveller who profoundly changed both the way we travel
and travel writing. Magherini named the syndrome after Stendhal not only in memory of the
writer’s near-faint when he visited Santa Croce, but above all because his life and personality
demonstrated a particular predisposition for the emotional experience, and can therefore be
used as a reference for contemporary phenomena. The general public later became familiar
with the syndrome as a result of the eponymous 1996 Dario Argento film in which a young
tourist visiting the Uffizi faints, overcome by the intensity of the works on display. Whether
Stendhal’s fainting sensation was brought on by the sight of Michelangelo’s David and
Botticelli’s Primavera, as Florentines like to think, rather than the thought of the number of
geniuses buried in Santa Croce, as Lombardi (1992) holds, is a matter of little importance.
The culture of artistic emotion was absorbed by early tourists in the course of the 19th century
and reproduced in the first travel guides produced by Murray for English tourists, and by
Baedeker for German tourists. These guidebooks had a common format: an introductory
chapter containing a condensed history and geography of the region being visited, a few
practical tips on interacting with the locals and extensive practical information on transport,
clothing, inns and trinkets to purchase, as well as basic phrases to learn the language and, as
the Murray guide pointed out, to leave the prejudices of the visitor’s culture of origin at home.
The Murray and Baedeker guides also had a common objective – besides allaying the
uncertainty of the trip, it was to give the tourist precise information on where to go, how to
get there, what to see and, above all, how to see. The two series of guides had the same
format, the “pocket handbook”, the same overall organisation of information and a similar red
cover, but Baedeker was the first to introduce a star rating system – one or two stars – for the
must-see key monuments, and pay particular attention to the maps. Herman Hesse (1983
edition) must have made ample use of the Baedeker guides; he mentions them several times in
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his diaries. As Lombardi (1992) points out, however, on 10 April 1901 around 4pm, after a
visit to Palazzo Pitti in Florence where he is fascinated by many things that are not mentioned
in the guide but make up all the fascination of his stay, Hesse notes in his diary that he has
decided to destroy his Baedeker. Hesse (1983 edition, pg. 65) describes “… the mysterious
enchantment of strolling through nameless dark lanes with a maze of overhanging buildings
and faces, where there is not even space for a carriage to pass… but in exchange, in these
alleys there is a constant bustle of buying and selling and fighting, of families and animals.”
Hesse, who stayed in Florence for 28 days on that trip, did not altogether abandon his detailed
and instructive sightseeing, but he combined it with observation of the life and culture of the
city’s inhabitants. Becheri (1995) defines the “Hesse syndrome” as “the idea or the desire that
emerges in many visitors to experience the city in greater depth and understand it”. Antonio
Paolucci (1995), former Commissioner for Cultural Heritage of Florence who was
undoubtedly in touch with Magherini, believes the “Stendhal Syndrome” is obvious in otherdirected tourist flows and pre-established journeys and emotions, while the “Hesse syndrome”
describes travellers capable of taking charge of their trip, who therefore break the mould.
Paolucci hopes for the emergence of a type of tourist who wishes to get off the tourist trail
and the rigid itineraries of organised tours by the major international tour operators, who give
their clients no time or space to explore alternatives to the pre-defined programme so as to
maintain control – especially financial control – over them. Paolucci (1995) points out that in
Florence, for example, extraordinary aesthetic emotion can be obtained “at the Horne or the
Bardini, the Casa Buonarroti museum or the Stibbert and in the many public collections that
few are aware of, where the summer is cool and solitary, as in the days when Bernard
Berenson used to visit the city”.
A page from the 1 March 1881 catalogue (fig.1) of Thomas Cook of London provides a
glimpse of the way the tourism industry was developing in the late 19th century. The
catalogue lists the company’s eighteenth organised tour to Italy, lasting approximately one
month and leaving from London on 6 April. The trip, led by the archaeologist Shakespeare
Wood, would include tours of Turin, Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Naples, Florence, Venice and
Milan. E. M. Forster’s 1808 novel A Room with a View and the eponymous 1985 James Ivory
film recreate the atmosphere of such a tour in Florence. The film was a success at the box
office and was followed by a televised adaptation broadcast on ITV in the UK in November
2007, and in April 2008 in the US. Forster’s book is a novel, but it has something of the
travelogue and it is perhaps no coincidence that the first edition was in a handbook size with a
red cover and gold lettering, like the Baedeker. The theme of the second chapter, titled “In
Santa Croce with No Baedeker”, is the Baedeker guide Lucy wants to use to gain a better
understanding of the sights she is seeing. Lucy is a well brought-up and suitably educated
young woman with a desire to experience the tombs of the greats intensely, the way Stendhal
later would. However, her companion, the novelist Eleanor Lavish, leaves the Baedeker
behind to show (unsuccessfully, as it turns out) that with her culture and experience as a
worldly-wise traveller, she has no need to consult a mere guidebook. Figure 2 shows the
itinerary placed over the map of Florence in the 1895 edition of the Baedeker (Italien in
einem Bande). Presumably this was the edition that Hesse destroyed, and perhaps also the one
Forster drew inspiration from. The figure shows the one and two-star monuments the
guidebook recommends visiting first. The guidebook proposes a 60-day Italian tour following
a precise itinerary, albeit with alternatives, with six days to be spent in Florence. There are 31
closely printed pages devoted to Florence, as well as a floor plan of the Uffizi and a good,
large format (30 sq. cm.), 1:10.000 scale map of the city.
International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013), 123-134
Figure 1: A page from the 1 March 1881 catalogue of Thomas Cook of London
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Recent editions of the Baedeker guide to Italy are quite different; it is now a paperback in a
plastic sleeve with a colour photograph on the cover. The guidebook has maintained its starrating system, as control over the tourist-and-reader is still important. But today’s users are
quite different from the tourists of a century ago. The focus of the guidebook has shifted from
individual monuments to the urban environment as a whole, including large spaces such as
squares. For reasons of comparison, it is worth noting that there are nine pages on Florence in
the current-day guide, with eight colour photographs, floor plans of the Uffizi and Palazzo
Pitti, a map of Piazza del Duomo and a small-format, 11 cm x 14 cm, 1:20.000 scale city map.
Florence is no longer part of an itinerary across Italy, it is merely inserted in alphabetical
order; the tourist no longer needs to cover a territory the way Stendhal did. The Baedeker of
the new millennium may well help travellers to leave the tourist trail, and if Hesse were alive
today he probably would not tear it up; he might not even buy and read and take it with him to
Italy.
Figure 2: The itinerary placed over the map of Florence in the 1895 edition of the Baedeker
(Italien in einem Bande)
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4. Kyoto and the Mishima Syndrome – A Particular Case of
Jerusalem Syndrome
In November 1827, Stendhal (2004 edition, p. 117), now over forty years old, is at St Peter’s
Basilica in Rome looking at the Pietà, which he describes as “...the most moving
representation in Christianity”. Describing his relationship with the divine through the work
of art, he says: “...Terror is the only sentiment that the divine can arouse in the weak mortal;
and Michelangelo seemed to have been born to arouse it, by means of marble and colours”.
Jerusalem is a unique attraction for followers of the three principal monotheistic religions.
The city acts as a religious magnet for the faithful who visit it; it is the city of the sacred
Bible. From 1980 onwards, various cases were recorded of pilgrims who began to suffer from
psychological problems similar to those observed in people affected by Stendhal syndrome as
soon as they arrived in Jerusalem. With ever-increasing numbers of tourists demonstrating
this phenomenon, it was decided to channel all such cases to one central facility, the Kfar
Shaul Mental Health Centre, for treatment. From 1980 to 1993, 1,200 tourists showing
symptoms of what had by now been identified as Jerusalem syndrome were referred to the
facility – around 100 tourists per year on average, 40 of whom were kept under observation in
the hospital. Three main types of patient with Jerusalem syndrome were identified on the
basis of clinical experience (Bar-El et al., 2000). For each category, the tourist’s reasons for
visiting Jerusalem, travel arrangements and pre-existing psychotic condition were taken into
account. Type 1 refers to individuals already diagnosed with a psychiatric condition before
their arrival in Jerusalem, who often undertake the trip to fulfil a mission. They travel on their
own, and already have a documented condition such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
There are four sub-categories to Type 1 – people who identify with characters from the Bible;
people who identify with a religious or political idea, people with ‘magical ideas’ concerning
sickness and health and healing possibilities connected with Jerusalem, and finally people
with family problems. Type 2 individuals have mental disorders and obsessions with fixed
ideas; however, they do not have a clear mental illness, and are therefore unlikely to be
undergoing psychiatric treatment. They travel in groups, rarely on their own. Type 3
individuals have no previous history of mental illness and show psychotic symptoms (anxiety,
agitation, nervousness or tension) only after their arrival in Jerusalem. They travel with
friends or family, or as part of an organised tour. Bar-El et al. (2000) consider Type 3 the
most interesting category, as it comprises people who recover quickly; their symptoms
disappear when they return home. Public awareness of Jerusalem syndrome spread in the runup to the new millennium, when there was expected to be an increased number of cases, as
well as because of Erin Sax’s 1998 documentary The Jerusalem Syndrome. “I was interested
not in uncovering if these people were truly connecting with something holy, but the criteria
being used to determine this,” Erin Sax explained. The March 2001 review of the film in the
Chicago Tribune reads: “The Jerusalem Syndrome is the name for a condition that affects
hundreds of visitors to that holy city each year, leaving them convinced that they need to stay,
preach or give themselves over to a higher power. The strength of the film lies in the
spiritually diverse nature of Jerusalem itself, which leaves plenty of room for conflict.” One
of the most striking clinical cases of Jerusalem syndrome is that of Australian tourist Michael
Rohan, whose intention was to destroy a mosque so a Jewish temple could be rebuilt in its
place. Imbued with the mystical apocalyptic symbolism contained in the Book of Zechariah,
Rohan partly succeeded in his intentions, setting fire on 21 August 1969 to one of the most
holy Muslim sites in Jerusalem. The psychiatric examination that followed diagnosed the
tourist’s inability to tell the difference between right and wrong. He was admitted to a
psychiatric hospital in Israel, and sent home a few years later to be taken care of by his
family. The occurrence and study of these phenomena are unfavourably viewed by those who
fear that widespread awareness of the syndrome will end up attracting mentally ill people and
affect the city’s reputation negatively. Kalian and Witztum (2000) have contested research
and publications on the Jerusalem syndrome. In their view, the number of tourists suffering
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from psychological disorders (around 50 each year) is hardly significant compared to the total
number of visitors – two million on average – to Jerusalem. They also point out that such
phenomena can be observed in similar percentages in all the world’s great tourist cities
without being studied and giving rise to scientific and media interest. As for the data
collected, the city of Jerusalem should not in itself be considered a pathogenic factor, as all
the individuals admitted to hospital are usually already mentally disturbed when they arrive in
Jerusalem. The syndrome is therefore merely the aggravation of a chronic mental illness, and
not a transitory psychotic episode. The eccentric and strange behaviour of tourists already
suffering from mental illness is exacerbated when they arrive in the holy city – a geographical
place that is the “axis mundi” of their religious belief.
On 21 May 1972, the mentally deranged Australian geologist Lazlo Toth shouted “I am Jesus
Christ” and attacked Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s Basilica – widely considered a work
of unique and incomparable expressive intensity – with a hammer, inflicting considerable
damage.
An instance of the burning of a building whose religious significance makes it an attraction
for flows of pilgrims and tourists can also be found in the Buddhist culture. A Japanese monk
set fire to a religious building in an incident that made the headlines at the time and
subsequently became the key theme of a famous novel that could almost be considered as a
travel book because of the importance of the building for tourists and pilgrims. The focus of
Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is the Kinkaku-ji Temple,
the most famous and most oft-visited building in Kyoto and in Japan. The novel sets the scene
for a dramatic confrontation between the beauty of the sacred building and the imperfections
of the monk who is its main character. “… the Golden Temple would seem to me like some
beautiful ship crossing the sea of time… In the daytime this strange ship lowered its anchor
with a look of innocence and submitted to being viewed by crowds of people; but when night
came, the surrounding darkness lent the ship a new force and it floated away, with its roof
billowing like a great sail.” The novel describes the relationship between the building, a
symbol of supreme beauty that one “could reach out and touch”, and its opposite, Mizoguchi,
a deformed young Buddhist monk who is obsessively attracted to it. The relationship moves
from first-hand knowledge to being successively tested, developed, transformed, modified
and brutally interrupted in phases that offer glimpses, in the background, of the events leading
up to and following World War II. Mizoguchi is fascinated by the beauty of the temple but
incapable of understanding it: “It doesn’t have to be at once, but please make friends with me
sometime and reveal your secret to me. I feel that your beauty is something I am very close to
seeing and yet cannot see.” According to Ciccarella (2007), “Mizoguchi becomes increasingly
aware that as long as the Pavilion is alive, he will not be a free man. The ‘ideal beauty’ of the
temple will always stand between him and ‘real beauty’; hence it will always stand between
him and life.” The monk’s setting fire to and burning down Kinkaku-ji, the actual 1950 news
event that inspired Mishima, is justified by the religious doctrine of death and the need to
destroy beauty, which is pure appearance. In this case, too, the story reached a wider audience
through Paul Schrader’s 1985 movie Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which dramatises
parts of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. No psychologists have studied the Kinkaku-ji
incident, and there are no reports of visitors to the temple showing any symptoms of mental
disorder. Yet Mishima’s novel contains the presuppositions of a disorder that could be named
the Kinkaku-ji syndrome, with the symptoms observed in all the other cases examined in this
paper, precisely because it recounts a physical and psychological journey – a synthesis of a
whole series of symptoms illustrated by other syndromes. It could be considered a synthesis
of what takes place in the mind of a tourist or pilgrim whose dramatic reaction to the grandeur
of a cultural landmark is to desire its destruction – the destruction of the tourist attraction.
International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2013), 123-134
133
5. Conclusions
The observation and in-depth analysis of tourism resources has taken on fresh importance
with the emergence of industrial-scale tourism made up of large numbers and mass emotions
that reach the general public through the mass media and ICT instruments. With tourism of
this scale, the destruction of tourist sights has become an ever-increasing, concrete and daily
risk. Until only a few decades ago the general perception was that tourists merely took
photographs, and could therefore not be a problem for the preservation of the cultural and
natural heritage sites they visited. More recently, we have become aware that tourism leaves
an increasingly heavy and invasive footprint that puts the very existence of tourist attractions
at risk. A hypothetical “Kinkaku-ji syndrome” would be comparable to Stendhal syndrome,
but its outcome would be the opposite, and more similar to the outcomes to which the oftenfatal embrace of mass tourism subjects cities of art and cultural heritage sites. The author of
this paper has visited Kyoto, and Kinkaku-ji, regularly over the past few years and noted that
here, as in many other places, visitor movements are restricted; visitors must follow a pre-set
path in order to protect the fragility of the site. In his relationship with the sights he is visiting,
the tourist ends up being forced into what could well become a new future syndrome – that of
the zoo in reverse, in which the visitor is shut up in a golden cage and observes the attraction
through the bars. Regardless of the new instruments and new technology that have been
introduced into our everyday lives, the impact of the content of guidebooks and travel stories
urge us to travel not only from one place on the planet to another, but also within our own
minds, and syndromes are a means to manifest phenomena and emotions that would
otherwise remain shut up inside our heads.
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