Books
Phase
Post-war Mediterranean Travel and Tourism
1950–1970
During the 1950s and 1960s, rising incomes, paid holidays and expanding civil aviation made Mediterranean travel accessible to a much broader section of the British and northern European public. Steamship and ferry routes remained important, while resorts, villas and small hotels adapted to seasonal foreign visitors.
Tourism developed unevenly alongside political instability, wartime memories, local poverty and rapid social change. Travellers often encountered societies that were neither timeless holiday landscapes nor simple extensions of northern European modernity.
Mary Stewart’s suspense novels use this transitional Mediterranean as a world of mobile outsiders, isolated houses, archaeological landscapes and local communities.
