The grand tour, and how it became a coach party

By the middle of the eighteenth century, a young British gentleman of sufficient means was expected to spend a year or more crossing the Continent, usually with a tutor in tow, on a circuit that took in Paris, the Alps, and then the great cities of Italy: Florence, Rome, Naples and, for those with the stomach for it, the ruins recently uncovered at Pompeii. The term for this, grand tour, was coined in the seventeenth century and stuck for good reason: it really was grand, in scale and in cost, and it was assumed to be the finishing school that turned a well-connected young man into a cultivated one.

What it was actually for

The tour was never really about sightseeing in the modern sense. It was an education in taste, language and diplomacy, conducted in person because there was no other way to acquire it. A tourist, a word that only entered common use once the practice was well established, was expected to study classical ruins, sit for a portrait, learn enough French and Italian to get by, and return home with crates of antiquities, paintings and the occasional dubious old master to furnish the family house. The itinerary mattered because the destinations were agreed upon: certain cities and certain sights had to be seen, in more or less the same order, by more or less everyone who could afford to go.

Why the railway killed it, and revived it

The grand tour, as an aristocratic institution, did not survive the nineteenth century. Two things finished it. The railway made the same journey vastly quicker and cheaper, and Thomas Cook, beginning with a temperance excursion by train in 1841 and building from there into package tours of Europe by the 1860s, worked out how to sell essentially the same itinerary to the middle classes, with none of the year-long commitment or the aristocratic pretension. What had been a rite of passage for the wealthy few became, within a generation, a holiday available to a great many more people, run to a schedule rather than an open-ended education.

The shape that survives

What is striking, looking at a modern escorted tour through Venice, Florence and Rome, or through Switzerland's mountain railways, is how closely the underlying shape still resembles the original circuit. The Alps are still crossed for their own sake rather than simply endured on the way to somewhere warmer, a habit that goes back to the grand tourists' own fascination with the sublime terror of high mountain passes, long before mountaineering existed as a pursuit in its own right. Interlaken and the railways around it, built in the nineteenth century largely to serve exactly this kind of traveller, remain a fixture of the modern Swiss tour for much the same reason they drew visitors two hundred years ago: nowhere else packs quite so much visible geology into quite so short a train journey.

What changed, and what did not

What has genuinely changed is who goes, and what it costs relative to a working life. The grand tour was, for most of its history, closed to anyone without significant private wealth and months to spare; the escorted tour opened the same idea to a middle class that had neither, by compressing the itinerary, sharing the cost across a coach party, and hiring a single guide rather than a personal tutor. What has not changed is the underlying instinct: that certain places reward being seen in sequence, with the journey between them treated as part of the education rather than an inconvenience to be endured. The modern escorted holiday, coach and guidebook rather than carriage and tutor, is the grand tour's most direct descendant, however little either camp would recognise the other's paperwork.

There is one more inheritance worth naming: the guide. The grand tourist's tutor, often a clergyman hired for the purpose, has a clear if unglamorous successor in the modern tour manager, the person who knows which entrance avoids the queue, which gallery closes early on a Monday, and what the guidebook gets slightly wrong. It is not a lineage either party would have predicted, but it is the one that actually happened.