Cultural Tourism as It Developed from the Time of the Grand Tour Essay

Cultural Tourism as It Developed from the Time of the Grand Tour - Essay Example Technology has been an important aspect of modern travel, the trains, planes, and automobiles that transport the traveller from one place to another an important part of facilitating travel. Cultural tourism has developed through the interest that has developed about certain areas of the world in which local offerings through culture, education, or merely through fun have supported an economic advantage to grow around a specific set of areas of interest. The Grand Tour The concept of the ‘Grand Tour’ was based upon 16th and 17th century educational tours that emerged in England and Ireland after the Reformation when Catholic pilgrimages were no longer possible under the new structures of religion that had become the Church of England. Britain is one of the first countries to establish a culture which can be observed for practices of tourism (Williams By the 18th century the travel experiences were referred to as the ‘Grand Tour’, a phrase that was first seen in a travel guide published in 1679 by Richard Lassel titled An Italian Voyage. The ‘Grand Tour’ lasted for several years, allowing for the beginnings of a career to take shape so that the traveller would begin to develop a world view from the experiences of the travel plan. This concept was a part of the education of English aristocratic culture. The result of the tours was a literary body of work in the form of travel guides that provided a framework of discovery for those who would follow on these types of travel experiences (Katz1998, p. 253-254). The Grand Tour was primarily a pursuit of the English, which was an experience that provides a contextual relationship to the beginnings of the modern period in the 18th century (Roberts 1998, p. 31). Travel in previous contexts had been based upon the unknown, explorations that would result in economic and cultural advantages that could include military and ambassadorial advantages for political purposes. Travel also occ urred for the purposes of relocation, but travel for the idea of educational experience and as a part of an extended leisure activity emerged during the time of the growth of travel guides and the emergence of a middle class that had the time and the means to pursue travel simply for the pursuit of experience (Roberts 1998, p. 31). As the middle class began to take on the ‘Grand Tour’, the educational purpose of the tour began to diminish. During the 1780s a shift in the purpose for the tour began to become noticeable as the purpose of leisure began to emerge. According to Richards (1996, p. 12) â€Å"The spatial pattern of the Grand Tour also changed , from the ‘Classical Grand Tour’ which concentrated on the culture of the ancient classical world and the Renaissance, to the ‘Romantic Grand Tour’ with more attention devoted to romantic views of urban and rural scenery†. The shift can be representative of an elite middle class that was b ored with educational based experiences and began to search for distractions that were less cerebral, looking for exotic and imaginative experimentation (Richards 1996, p. 12). The Geography of Travel Travel requires the element of geography, the search for interesting and foreign locals based upon the idea that there is a starting point and a destination. Holden