The Grand Tour
A few Augusts ago, in Positano, a precipitous town on Italy’s Amalfi coast long favored by tourists, I encountered a custom that I assumed was long dead. A group of Americans—three mothers, two fathers and five teenage sons and daughters—checked into my hotel. I asked one of the girls where they were coming from. She said they had already “done” Venice, Florence, and Rome and were about to do Pompeii, Capri and the Bay of Naples.
Those were all classic destinations on the Grand Tour, a tradition dating from 17th-century England, of sending the children of the educated classes to the Continent to imbibe the cultural riches of the Old World. Not to expose them to Europe’s churches, monuments, and museums was to bring them up half-civilized.
But I thought the tradition ended with World War II—specifically, with the Grand Tour my sister and I were taken on in the summer of 1939. War was declared while we were sailing home on the Statendam, and when it was over, in 1945, travel was no longer the possession of the privileged few; seven million American servicemen had joined the club. Within another decade jetliners would bring hordes of tourists to remote sites where only individual travelers had gone before. Angkor Wat was as reachable as Westminster Abbey.