The Grand Tour
Beginning in the sixteenth century and
peaking in the eighteenth, increasing
numbers of affluent travelers from northern
Europe, along with their tutors, artists,
chaperones, and sometimes spouses,
embarked on an extended educational
journey now known as the Grand Tour. Often
capping or complementing a university
degree, this mobile rite of passage aimed to
deepen historical, economic, political, and
cultural knowledge while honing aesthetic
tastes. Typically focused on Italy but often
incorporating France, the Alps, Germany and
the Low Countries, the Tour exposed
generations of impressionable travelers to
unfamiliar places, spaces, objects, customs,
people, and ideas. This seminar examines
the Grand Tour in its cultural and artistic
dimensions, asking where travelers went,
what they saw, whom they met, what they
acquired, and how their experience inflected
their vision of the world. Focusing on visual
and material culture and making use of firsthand accounts, we will study the Tour’s
impact on both the visitors and the visited,
asking how the exchanges it promoted
fostered the spread of new styles, new
perspectives, and new forms of living. 3
credits. Satisfies the chronological
requirement. MDP.