“We no longer seek a cultural centre, the journey is no longer finite,” writes Ted Scheinman of today’s young travelers and their updated Grand Tour. Gone are the days when monied Englishmen would traipse around Western Europe, hunting for taste and refinement on the Continent.
Today’s travelers are not just the elites of Britain, nor are they so narrow in their geographic interests. They no longer visit a small constellation of European hubs in search of culture and history. Having left behind this Cassiopeia, they explore a limitless galaxy of vineyards and mountains, temples and villages, and yes, sometimes even museums.
Scheinman’s right to point out that today’s travel is less about finding the center of the world and more about centering your own world. I’d like to suggest that in addition to widening their geographic and cultural boundaries, today’s critical and savvy “Grand Tourists” also widen their own temporal and even ethical views.
As Scheinman writes, Richard Lassels (who coined the term “Grand Tour”) believed that “travel is central to the four areas of improvement and education: intellectual, social, ethical, and political.” Yet as Alexander Pope reminds us, travel abroad was and is often an exercise in luxury if not decadence. The English traveler of yore “Tried all hors-d’œuvres, all liqueurs defined, / Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined.” I have to admit, these lines remind me of some of my own wine-soaked experiences of summertime Italy.
But I’ve been reminded recently of how this original aim of travel as ethical edification is still alive today. This past July, a teenager posted a saccharine selfie taken at Auschwitz, the notorious World War II concentration camp. The Internet’s collective blood boiled at the ignorance of history and the appropriation of atrocious inhumanity as tactless backdrop. Tourists, so we learned, are expected to learn the errors of history, not simply to enjoy the view.
A similar but perhaps less obvious example is the Colosseum in Rome. As a teacher of the Latin education program to which Scheinman refers throughout his article, I have taken students to this Roman mega-monument (or perhaps magno-monument?) more times than I can enumerare. Around this building one finds sunburned men in gladiator costumes, waiting to take silly photographs with tourists. Most visitors are simply “doing” the Colosseum: they take a couple pictures, they march quickly around the inside looking for shade, and they make a few thumb motions from that movie about that guy with the sword or whatever.
But as museum placards, surviving literature from Augustine and Martial, and sure, even Russell Crowe in Gladiator remind us, we should be awestruck by more than the beauty of this massive stone theater. We should also marvel at the savagery of the Flavian emperors and at the forgotten victims who died cruel, violent deaths on the Colosseum floor. To do more than “doing” the Colosseum requires travelers to seek out tragedy and loss.
Learning about these travesties should never be an excuse to develop smug presentism. Yes, autocratic empires infringed upon basic human rights, and yes, the brutality of war merits a more contemplative reaction than a wide grin. But inhumanity is a historical constant. It is a hard lesson to learn, but one we must study vigilantly.
Travel itself may, in fact, be the best teacher of this lesson. Like Cicero’s historia, travel can be a modern magistra vitae: a “teacher of life” that both demands and provides our geographic, temporal, cultural, and ethical consciousness. It allows us to learn about the faults and accomplishments of the past, the problems and progress of the present, and the dangers and promise of the future. Travel shows us that these dimensions of history and experience, perhaps as Lassels himself originally conceived, are inseparable.
