Adventure Travel

The Grand Tour was an upper-class European travel itinerary that flourished from about 1660 until the arrival of mass rail transit in the 1840s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was coined by Richard Lassels (c 1603-1668), an expatriate Roman Catholic priest who wrote The Voyage of Italy, which was published posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London. Lassels' introduction classed the four departments in which travel furnished "an accomplished, consummate Traveller": intellectually, socially, ethically, by the opportunity of drawing moral instruction from all the traveller saw, and politically. The Grand Tour served as an educational rite of passage for males of the British nobility and wealthy gentry, whose address among their entourage made "Milord" a French and Italian byword for any British gentlemen. Similar trips were made by the wealthy of other Protestant Northern European nations; in general, the French looked to the salons of Paris and the court of Versailles instead, to provide a cultured polish to its gilded youth and reinforce standards of taste. The primary value of the Grand Tour lay in the exposure both to the cultural artifacts of antiquity and the Renaissance and to the aristocratic and fashionable society of the European continent. A grand tour could last from several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a knowledgeable guide.

The far from superficial cultural importance of the Grand Tour can be underestimated by those who have not absorbed E.P. Thompson's often-quoted assertion that "ruling-class control in the eighteenth century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power."

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