The eighteenth-century Grand Tour: from aristocratic erudition to bourgeois sentiment

The Grand Tour, the traditional education of young aristocrats in classical antiquity and post-Renaissance art, has been a dominant feature in historical perspective. This focus, however, downplays important changes in foreign travel in Italy during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The social composition of tourists changed over time: more families, more women, more bourgeois traveled, and the presence of many long-term foreign residents (diplomats, merchants, bankers, artists) was both necessary to the existence of the aristocratic tour, and led to its transformation into something like a modern tourist industry. By the early nineteenth century travelers in Italy were implicated in a complex economy of site-seeing and collecting, driven less by classical erudition than by the orchestration and packaging of emotional and aesthetic experiences of the sublime and the beautiful. The exemplary tourist was no longer a patrician erudite, but had become a person of acute feeling.

John Brewer is Eli and Edye Broad Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of History and Literature at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He is the author of, among many other works, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. He is currently visiting fellow at the Munich Center of Advanced Studies.