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Article: Grand Tour
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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GRAND TOUR
GRAND TOUR.
Protracted travel for pleasure was scarcely unknown in classical and medieval times, but it developed greatly in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, becoming part of the ideal education and image of the social elite as well as an important source of descriptive and imaginative literature and art. As tourism developed, its patterns became more regular, and the assumptions about where a tourist should go became more predictable. Literary conventions were also established. The term the "grand tour" reflects a subsequent sense that this was an ideal period of the fusion of tourism and social status as well as a contemporary desire to distinguish ...