AA-2026-76AE23
On the image
A pristine Mediterranean cove displays the kind of geography that made tourism possible once people owned reliable automobiles and believed they deserved a holiday. The white limestone formations that dominate the foreground and distant shoreline are the real estate agent's dream—dramatic enough to photograph, inaccessible enough to feel exclusive, and utterly useless for building anything. This appears to be a colour film record of the sort taken during the postwar travel boom, when Europeans and North Americans were discovering that other countries had coastlines and that these could be visited if one saved up and drove south. The vegetation-covered slopes in the distance and the precise blue saturation of mid-century colour stock suggest this is likely a Mediterranean location—perhaps the Adriatic or the coast of southern France or Spain—where such formations are common and where tourism infrastructure was beginning to take shape around the idea that untouched nature was now a commodity to be photographed and sold back home. Someone stood on the rocks with a camera and decided this vista was worth recording, which means they were either a traveller making a memory or a professional assembling material for promotional literature, and either way they were documenting a moment when the Mediterranean stopped being merely where people lived and became a place people went.
Visually related — by likeness
Mediterranean Coastal Inlet with White Limestone Cliffs, circa 1950s. 1945–1960. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-76AE23. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mediterranean-coastal-inlet-with-white-limestone-cliffs-circa-1950s.
@misc{aaAA202676AE23,
title = {Mediterranean Coastal Inlet with White Limestone Cliffs, circa 1950s},
year = {1945–1960},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-76AE23},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mediterranean-coastal-inlet-with-white-limestone-cliffs-circa-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Mediterranean Coastal Inlet with White Limestone Cliffs, circa 1950s PY - 1945–1960 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-76AE23 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/mediterranean-coastal-inlet-with-white-limestone-cliffs-circa-1950s ER -
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