Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was the principally 17th-to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank when they had come of age. The custom, which flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s and was associated with a standard itinerary, served as an educational rite of passage. Though it was primarily associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry, similar trips were made by wealthy young men of other Protestant Northern European nations, and, from the second half of the 18th century, by some South and North Americans. By the mid-18th century, the Grand Tour had become a regular feature of aristocratic education in Central Europe as well, although it was restricted to the higher nobility. The tradition declined in Europe as enthusiasm for classical culture waned, and with the advent of accessible rail and steamship travel, an era in which Thomas Cook made the Cook's Tour of early mass tourism a byword starting in the 1870s. However, with the rise of industrialization in the United States in the 19th century, American Gilded Age nouveau riche adopted the Grand Tour for both sexes and among those of more advanced years as a means of gaining both exposure and association with the sophistication of Europe. Even those of lesser means sought to mimic the pilgrimage, as satirized in Mark Twain's enormously popular Innocents Abroad in 1869. The primary value of the Grand Tour lay in its exposure to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. It also provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music. A Grand Tour could last anywhere from several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a cicerone, a knowledgeable guide or tutor. Rome for many centuries had already been the destination of pilgrims, especially during Jubilee when European clergy visited the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome. In Britain, Thomas Coryat's travel book Coryat's Crudities, published during the Twelve Years' Truce, was an early influence on the Grand Tour but it was the far more extensive tour through Italy as far as Naples undertaken by the Collector Earl of Arundel, with his wife and children in 1613-14 that established the most significant precedent. This is partly because he asked Inigo Jones, not yet established as an architect but already known as a great traveller and masque designer, to act as his cicerone. Larger numbers of tourists began their tours after the Peace of Munster in 1648. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term was by Richard Lassels, an expatriate Roman Catholic priest, in his book The Voyage of Italy, which was published posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London. Lassels's introduction listed four areas in which travel furnished an accomplished, consummate Traveller: the intellectual, the social, the ethical, and the political. As a young man at the outset of his account of a repeat Grand Tour, the historian Edward Gibbon remarked that According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman. Consciously adapted for intellectual self-improvement, Gibbon was revisiting the Continent on a larger and more liberal plan; most Grand Tourists did not pause more than briefly in libraries. On the eve of the Romantic era he played a significant part in introducing, William Beckford wrote a vivid account of his Grand Tour that made Gibbon's unadventurous Italian tour look distinctly conventional. The typical 18th-century stance was that of the studious observer travelling through foreign lands reporting his findings on human nature for those unfortunates who stayed at home. Recounting one's observations to society at large to increase its welfare was considered an obligation; the Grand Tour flourished in this mindset. In essence, the Grand Tour was neither a scholarly pilgrimage nor a religious one, though a pleasurable stay in Venice and a residence in Rome were essential. Catholic Grand Tourists followed the same routes as Protestant Whigs. Since the 17th century, a tour to such places was also considered essential for budding artists to understand proper painting and sculpture techniques, though the trappings of the Grand Tour, valets and coachmen, perhaps a cook, certainly a bear-leader or scholarly guide, were beyond their reach.
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