Grand Tour

Abstract

Abstract Our present-day understanding of the classic Grand Tour hovers between identification and estrangement. On the one hand, there is a tendency among scholars to tone down the differences between early modern travel and modern tourism. Focusing on apparent similarities—the fascination for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the burgeoning tourism industry, the craving for souvenirs, and so on—the Grand Tour traveler becomes a tourist avant la lettre. On the other hand, there is also a strand to maximize the differences by emphasizing the danger and discomfort involved. Focusing on highwaymen and pirates, spectacular accidents, religious intolerance, epidemic diseases, and other calamities, a black-and-white opposition is created between our bland vacationing and its more spectacular premodern variant. To move beyond these classic, binary storylines on the Grand Tour, a more evolutionary lens will be explored here. How did early modern travel evolve in terms of space and time, the social profile of the travelers, and their motivations?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.