Vladimir Raitz

I arrived in Sardinia in mid-August 2022. It was the third time I landed on the island, but it was the first time I landed without a return ticket to America. I was no longer a tourist, nor a traveler; I could do without that distinction, which had always seemed false to me anyway. Soon I would feel entitled to make fun of tourists without too much hypocrisy, as did Lord Byron, who when he moved to Italy in 1816 immediately began to complain about the infestation of Englishmen in Rome and Florence.

My wife had come to pick me up at Olbia airport. I didn’t have suitable clothes for the Sardinian summer, I probably also smelled. I was hoping to go straight to Sassari, take a shower, go to sleep, but it was early and we had the whole afternoon ahead of us. The most reasonable option was to take a trip to the Costa Smeralda.

I had never been to the Costa Smeralda, but the time had come: I couldn’t shed my identity as a tourist without first paying a visit to Sardinia’s tourist destination par excellence, a place that, in addition to being invaded by tourists, literally did not exist before the tourists arrived. We took a walk in Porto Cervo (the streets just repaved, the green lawns immaculate like those of a wealthy American suburb), we passed the Gucci and Hermés shops on the square, all in red bricks, which is officially called ” The Square”, and we finally stopped in front of the yachts, white and ferocious.

In the almost two years that have passed since then, the complex attitude of the Sardinians towards the Costa Smeralda – a mixture of pride, contempt and amused bewilderment – ​​has become more familiar to me. In the municipality of Arzachena, in the province of Sassari, many argue for example that the Costa Smeralda has brought jobs and investments to a region that was once among the poorest on the island, yet that stretch of coast also seems to represent all the exploitation, the unfairness and idiocy of the tourism industry. Every controversy about tourism in Sardinia concerns the Costa Smeralda in some way.

And in fact in the common imagination it is on the Costa Smeralda that the tourism development of Sardinia began. It was 1962 and the Aga Khan founded the Costa Smeralda Consortium with the aim of purchasing and developing thousands of hectares of uncultivated land along the Gallura coasts. Initially the Aga Khan’s project was explicitly anti-tourist, or at least advertised as such: «The Costa Smeralda has everything, except crowds of tourists. And he will never have them”, we read in 1968 in a full-page advert in the English glossy magazine Country Life. The typical visitor that the Consortium wanted to attract was not the average consumer, but the real estate investor willing to build his own luxury villa in an exclusive context.

Advertisement for the Costa Smeralda Consortium founded by the Aga Khan on Country Life, 7 March 1968

In reality, the history of modern tourism in Sardinia had begun a decade earlier. The destination was not the Costa Smeralda, but the more humble Alghero, and the promoter was not the Aga Khan (which is the hereditary title of the imam of the Nizarites or “Sect of the Assassins”, a current of Shiite Islam), but a Russian-born British journalist and entrepreneur named Vladimir Raitz. In 1949, after inheriting £3,000 from his grandmother and leaving his job at the Reuters news agency, Raitz had founded Horizon Holidays, the first package holiday company aimed at the average tourist. To all intents and purposes, it was Raitz who patented the cheap holiday “under the sun” in Europe – and in fact Horizon advertised itself as “the company that invented all-inclusive flights in the sunny Mediterranean”.

Vladimir Raitz is little known in Italy, but it was he who more than anyone else brought mass tourism to Sardinia. The history of this type of tourism is easily traceable in British newspapers from the middle of the last century, which document in a vivid and detailed way – through advertisements, notices, promotional articles and travel diaries – the development of Sardinia as an attractive tourist destination in the so-called Med”.

It’s important to realize that, before Raitz started shipping middle-class Englishmen to Alghero, Sardinia was among the most remote places in Europe. It had never been a stop on the Grand Tour of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and had never figured as a destination during the “golden age of travel” between 1880 and 1930 (the era of the Thomas Cook travel agency & Son and the Orient Express). Since 1820 Sardinia had periodically attracted European writers and scholars (the most famous was D. H. Lawrence, who arrived in January 1921 and dedicated a book to it), but it continued to be an eccentric choice, described by each of these travelers as a wild and remote island. But like Byron’s Venice or Henry James’s Rome, too

and our idea of ​​Sardinia is partly the product of the experiences and imagination of foreign writers.

Until the advent of commercial flights in the mid-1950s, however, Sardinia remained extremely difficult to reach (it still is quite difficult, except during the tourist season). When the English writer and journalist Douglas Goldring, during a relaxing stay in Provence in 1928, decided to visit Sardinia, he discovered that many in Nice had not even heard of it. The only possibility to get there was to go through Corsica first. Two decades later, in February 1950, four years before Horizon organized its first charter flights to Alghero, the Daily Mirror published an article on low-cost hostels on the continent; France, Germany, Austria and Norway are mentioned as rather convenient destinations, but only “a daring few, and with a lot of time available, venture, backpacks on their shoulders, to Corsica and Sardinia”.

In the early 1950s, however, change was already underway. For the first time aircraft were used commercially, and many Royal Air Force pilots who had fought in the Second World War continued to fly because they were employed by airlines. In the UK the market for foreign holidays exploded, and all-inclusive “sunny” holidays became the declared aspiration of the middle-class consumer. “Have you booked your trip to the sun yet?” asked the ubiquitous Horizon ad. Meanwhile, the eradication of malaria in Sardinia – the consequence of a joint initiative between UNRRA and the Rockefeller Foundation – had made the island much more attractive for visitors, no longer a place of “malaria and misery”, to take borrowed one of the phrases of the lawyer John Warre Tyndale, who published three volumes of essays on Sardinia in 1849.

When Raitz founded Horizon Holidays in October 1949, he had an innovative and unproven business model. Its only destination was Corsica and, by order of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, its only customers had to be students and teachers (this strange rule was abolished in the autumn of 1951). Transport historian Peter Lyth’s description of these first Horizon holidays in Corsica vividly conveys Raitz’s entrepreneurial spirit: after a six-hour flight to Calvi on a Douglas DC-3 (Dakota), until a few years earlier employed as a warplane, English holidaymakers spent two weeks tenting on a Corsica beach in the new “Club Franco-Britannique”, with two “meat” meals a day and plenty of local wine, to subtly attract frustrated youngsters from the rationing still in force in post-war England. A year later, Mallorca was added as a destination and, in January 1954, Horizon expanded to Sardinia.

Daily News, January 6, 1954

In his 2001 book Flight to the Sun. The Story of the Holiday Revolution Raitz says he chose Alghero as a destination for its “ancient buildings”, its “enchanting beach” and because he had found “sufficient hotel accommodation for a plane load of tourists per week”, which evidently did not exist elsewhere in Sardinia. Vladimir Raitz visited Alghero in 1953, signing contracts with the owners of the three hotels existing at the time: the Hotel La Lepanto, the Hotel Margherita (still under construction at the time) and the Hotel Las Tronas where Samuel Beckett would have spent the summer of 1967 and 1970, after winning the Nobel (the hotel was owned by the Count of Sant’Elia, but supervised by his butler Rossi).

In March 1954 the poet and sports journalist Alan Ross published The Bandit on the Billiard Table, a book about his tour of Sardinia the previous year. Ross had to travel on a steamer from Bonifacio to La Maddalena, but readers of his book could now take a direct flight from Gatwick to Alghero. The all-inclusive fortnight packages started from 43.10 pounds (which in 2024 would correspond to approximately 1,200 euros). In short, Sardinia had never been so accessible.

If Raitz was the first to bring tourists to Sardinia by plane, the island’s notoriety in the United Kingdom was increased by the visit, in March 1956, of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Philip the Duke of Edinburgh who arrived on the royal yacht Britannia but they were unable to disembark at La Maddalena due to rain and snow (they consoled themselves with a walk to Caprera). The press also reported subsequent celebrity visits, notably the cruise to Sardinia of newlywed Grace Kelly and the Prince of Monaco in the summer of 1956 with the actress and model Hjördis Genberg as guest, the princess’s honeymoon Margaretha of Sweden and Joh

n Ambler in the summer of 1964, which was followed, for almost every summer throughout the decade, by the stays of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, guests of the Aga Khan.

Alongside reports on high-profile visits, there were many newspaper articles testifying to the growing interest of the British public in Sardinia: a 1954 exhibition entitled Ancient Bronzes from Sardinia at the Italian Institute in London organized by the Arts Council; a troupe of Scottish dancers in Sassari in 1957 to perform at the Cavalcata, the dance and song festival that takes place in the city every year; a radio program entitled Come with me to Sardinia (Come with me to Sardinia) which was broadcast in September 1959 to present «experiences and music of the island».

Promotional articles began to be published in the mid-1950s (thirteen profiles, often richly illustrated, appeared in The Sphere magazine alone between 1954 and 1963). They proposed Sardinia as a paradise ready to be discovered; at the same time, many Britons returning from the island held what were then called Holiday Talks in their hometowns, telling stories of pristine beaches and picturesque towns. A common feature of the reports was the strong fascination with bandits – the recurring stories of theft and violence did not discourage British tourists – who were if anything an attraction for those who liked to add a touch of adventure and danger to their holiday in the sun; «EVEN THE BANDITS ARE THERE TO MAKE YOU HAPPY», proclaimed the Daily Herald in June 1960, guaranteeing its readers an island «still extraordinarily wild and uncontaminated, perfect for a real holiday ‘away from it all’».

It wasn’t long before other travel companies were offering package holidays to the island: in the late 1960s, Sardinia was included in the list of destinations of Wallace Arnold Tours, Lambert Brothers, Galleon Travel and Pontins, who opened the Pontinental Hotel in Platamona in 1963. Horizon did not last long in this competitive market: in February 1973 it was taken over by the Court Line group, which was already running Clarksons Holidays, and went bankrupt a few months later. Raitz, meanwhile, had turned his attention to the holiday market in Malta and Cuba. Throughout the 1970s Sardinia remained a rather esoteric Mediterranean destination (not as popular with Britons as Mallorca or the Costa Brava, for example), but, as its popularity grew, its image as a wild, dangerous and “uncontaminated” destination transformed into a tourist fantasy increasingly distant from reality.

Not even the Costa Smeralda remained exclusive for long, as the Aga Khan had promised. Already in the Seventies the Consortium of the same name began to use more encouraging tones in advertising, defining Sardinia as a “holiday region” and even reassuring readers about prices: “a villa on the Costa Smeralda costs only £10,000”. And so tourists who stayed in the cheaper resorts of Alghero or Rena Majore began to go to Porto Cervo to see how the rich spent their holidays: rather than the white beaches or the crystal clear water, the main attraction of the Costa Smeralda became the other tourists and their wealth. In this sense, things haven’t changed much. My wife and I, that afternoon two years ago in Porto Cervo, also ended up joining a gathering of people who never took their eyes off one of the yachts – rumor had it it belonged to the footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović – in the hope of catching a glimpse of it from behind the glasses.