Rites of Passage and the Grand Tour: Discovering, Imagining and Inventing European Civilization in the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

This chapter discusses the significance of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. The itinerary of the Grand Tour offered a program of postgraduate studies which aimed to lift the veil of ignorance of an undergraduate curriculum that embraced classical languages but not the civilizations that had produced them. Tourists of one denomination or another had been in great abundance in European history before the eighteenth century, and many of the motives that had inspired travelers in medieval and early modern Europe—diplomacy, commerce, adventure and, especially outside Europe, missionary zeal and anthropological curiosity—remained widely prevalent. But perhaps the most striking differences between grand tourism in the eighteenth century and journeys undertaken by earlier travelers revolve around the conceptions of civilization which inspired eighteenth-century voyagers to retrace Europe's origins and partake of its most glorious antiquity.