In 1817, the English poet Lord Byron wrote home to his friend Thomas Moore that Southern Europe was “pestilential with English,” and that “the most distant glimpse of them poisoned the whole scene.” Moore apparently agreed; “And is there then no earthly place,” he wrote shortly after, “where we can rest in dream Elysian / without some cursed round English face / Popping up near to break the vision?” And yet, despite their purported disdain for the citizens of their own country, their own travels centered around fulfilling English expectations! Both poets published their travel journals, sent letters designed to be circulated amongst the upper class, and solidified their place in society by attending decadent parties hosted by other British abroad. This odd contradiction—in which travelers expected a stereotyped “pure” cultural experience while simultaneously relying on their own society to validate it—or, at least, the ideal version of it they chose to share—was typical of the “Grand Tour,” a variety of travel that originated in the late 1600s and continues to impact us today.
The “Grand Tour” was an expedition across Southern Europe, seen as the fashionable “finishing step” in the classical education of young British aristocrats, and eventually wealthy Americans.Theoretically, it was intended to deepen understanding of politics, history, and the arts, though, in practice, it frequently devolved into a months-long decadent party. The itinerary of these travelers, judging from their travel journals, documents, and letters, was remarkably consistent, beginning, according to traveler Conyers Middleton in 1729, in “gay and fluttering” Paris and culminating in “solid, manly, and rational” Rome.
Across its decades of popularity, the tour shaped aesthetic sensibilities; amateur collectors brought back antiquities en masse for their private collections, then displayed those collections in Neo-Classical estates which attempted to capture the “grandeur that was Rome.” In addition to these visually evident repercussions, it changed political language, heightened interest in the empires of the past, and impacted literature, giving a wealth of new experiences to write about and changing the “travel journal” genre. Underlying all of these changes, however, was a shift in the way that the English-speaking world viewed travel and experienced other cultures.
During the Middle Ages, the vast majority of non-business travel was centered around pilgrimage. Pilgrimage was, of course, oriented towards a connection with the spiritual significance of the site and personal experiences with the sacred. With their shift to Protestantism, this mode of travel vanished for the British. By the advent of the 18th century, a new ethos of travel had emerged, one focused not on connection to the sacred, but on the great minds and events of the past. This shift can be seen most clearly in travel records or journals; the experiential, emotional focus was exchanged for a cut-and-dry record of all the famous sites, most often those associated with antiquity, that one had visited.
This shift was facilitated by a new type of publication—the guidebook. Guidebooks created a sort of secular canon of sites to visit, naming, framing, and elevating locations that “men of standing” were expected to have seen. To maximize the number of these locations they could visit, aristocrats would hire an antiquarian, a historical tour guide, in order to, as one traveler put it, not waste time in “wearisome and unsatisfactory perambulations.” The sites that Grand Tourists would visit had become something to be observed, not experienced, packaged in a neat set of expectations, and displayed as a marker of refinement.
An excellent example of this is found in the tourists’ treatment of Rome, the “Eternal City.” The Guidebooks which focused on Rome presented it as timeless and unchanging. The sites were granted a set of “eternal meanings,” becoming a staging ground for distanced, refined philosophical reflections. Edward Gibbon wrote that the Capitoline Hill “gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.” Such reflections were a standard cultural trope. Rome was experienced completely abstractly, affirming the validity of British mindsets towards philosophy, politics, and human nature.
Entwined with the idealized images of the sites was an idealized image of the traveler. William Hazlit, a guidebook writer from the early 1800s, offers a telling description of tourist identity abroad:
“[The tour] demands an effort to exchange our actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of our old transports revive very keenly, we must ‘jump’ all our present comforts and connexions. Our romantic and itinerant character is not to be domesticated. … The time we [spend abroad] is both delightful and in one sense instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright existence, and never to join kindly to it. We are not the same, but another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out of our own country.”
Just as the sites had to be “packaged” by antiquarians and guidebooks to validate them, so experiences had to be packaged by the traveler’s letters and journals, crafting an “ideal” self into which one would transform while abroad. Pilgrimages had been outside of normal society, replicating the ascetic removal that characterized many of the saints. The Grand Tour, on the other hand, was the ultimate marker of one’s place in society. It not only demonstrated that one was “cultured,” but provided one with tangible, displayable markers of it, in the form of writings to be published and antiquities to display. Travel shifted from something to be experienced to something to be performed.
Though the phenomenon of the Grand Tour ended in the mid-1800s when railways made travel accessible to the masses, its legacy remains with us today. The modern tourist’s travel agenda of “significant sites” in Rome was determined by the Grand Tourists. For example, the Temple of Hadrian in Rome, despite being a remarkably impressive building in the center of Rome, is rarely present on travel “must-see lists.” Why? Because during the time of the Grand Tour, it served as a customs office, and its utilitarian use, which shattered the timeless image of Rome, was distasteful to tourists.
More significant, however, is the lingering impact on attitudes towards travel. It is easy to find parallels between the “travel portraits” of the Grand Tour, and the selfies that tourists take outside of the Arc de Triomphe or Colosseum today. Certainly, our use of social media to project an ideal self and validate our experiences is in line with a 1700s attitude—the British aristocracy would have loved Instagram! As modern tourists, we are our own worst enemy, bemoaning the crowds and “lack of authenticity,” while undercutting any chance authenticity might have had, digitally reinforcing the idealization of ourselves and our encounters, insisting on visiting the same set of pre-approved “must-see” sites.
What is to be done? If we don’t like the stereotyping and inauthenticity that accompanies modern travel, we might consider taking a few lessons from the pilgrimage mindset. While not all of our travels today are religiously focused, it’s never a bad thing to ponder the deeper, or more personal, meaning of a site. Know why you are visiting it, instead of having a guidebook determine its significance for you. Whether this means asking a local, reading up on its history, or spending more time at particular locales instead of rushing to “see everything,” taking the focus off of preset cultural expectations is always beneficial. Of course, the most direct step anyone can take is to avoid idealizing their travels through social media; emotions and experiences don’t need the approval of the masses to be genuine! Then, perhaps, we can escape Moore’s vision of travel in which “Go where we may, rest where we will / Eternal London (or New York!) haunts us still.”
