The Grand Tour and the Invention of the Tourist

Almost everything about how educated Europeans travel — the itinerary, the guidebook, the souvenir, the photograph of yourself in front of the monument — was established by a specific practice between roughly 1660 and 1840.

What it was

The Grand Tour was an extended journey through the Continent undertaken by young, largely British and northern European men of means, usually accompanied by a tutor. It could last from a year to five. The destination that mattered was Italy.

The stated purpose was education: classical antiquity seen first-hand, languages acquired, manners polished, connections made. The unstated purpose included a good deal of what would now be called a gap year.

The itinerary that became the itinerary

Paris, then across the Alps, then Turin, Florence, Rome, Naples — with Venice for the carnival and, after their rediscovery in the mid-eighteenth century, Pompeii and Herculaneum. That sequence is still recognisably the shape of a first trip to Italy.

It created industries

Demand produced supply. Local guides — ciceroni — worked the ruins. Printed guidebooks appeared. A market in antiquities emerged, and with it a parallel market in forgeries. Painters made a living selling views: Canaletto’s Venice scenes were substantially a souvenir trade for British visitors, and Piranesi’s etchings of Rome shaped how the ruins were imagined by people who never saw them.

Portraitists in Rome specialised in painting visitors posed against antiquities. That is the ancestor of the photograph you take at the Colosseum.

What came back with them

The returning tourists brought objects, and the objects became collections, and the collections became museums. They also brought an architectural taste: the Palladian and neoclassical country houses across Britain are in a direct sense Grand Tour souvenirs at building scale.

And who was excluded

It was expensive, male by default, and dependent on the political stability of the routes. Women travelled, but usually as part of a family party and with sharply reduced freedom. Railways eventually democratised the journey and, in doing so, turned the Grand Tour into tourism — which contemporaries complained about in terms almost identical to complaints about overtourism now.