Welcome to my Wanderjahr: March 2007

Welcome to my blogsite!

I'll be adding to this as I travel around Europe. Follow me as I wander the "Continent", and I'm sure it will be entertaining...

~Dave (Voyager)

West of the Moon, East of the Sun

The Grand Tour: a Brief History

Once upon a time, for a fortunate few, travel was the worldliest form of education and a vital part of life. From the late 17th century until the end of the 18th century, privileged young women and men made ready for adulthood by embarking on the Grand Tour, an extended journey through Western Europe that was a crucial rite of passage for the European and American elite. They learned fencing and French in Paris, riding and music in Vienna, and invariably they immersed themselves in art, politics, history, and classical literature in the great city-states of the Italian peninsula, before Italy itself existed . . . Venice, Florence, Naples, and Rome, the Eternal City.
During these extended voyages, which often lasted years and were considered so central to a young person’s upbringing that they sometimes replaced a college degree, travelers not only became intimately acquainted with these fabled lands but also experienced firsthand the native ways of life so stimulatingly different from their own.
(While the goal of the Grand Tour was educational a great deal of time was spent in more frivolous pursuits such as extensive drinking, gambling, and intimate encounters. The journals and sketches that were supposed to be completed during the Tour were often left quite blank.)
In an age of horse-drawn carriages and sailing ships, getting there was itself part of the adventure. For all the cosseting that aristocratic ramblers might have received in the capital cities, they could never escape the inherent adventure of the journey. Crossing the storm-tossed English Channel and the ice wildernesses of the Alpine passes, surviving the bandit-infested highways of Campania and the flea-ridden inns of the Black Forest, travelers faced unfamiliar risks and uncertainties, met unlooked-for companions, and were constantly aware of the serpentine passage of time. In the process, they learned about life in one of the best laboratories of human experience: the road. The Grand Tour was an education in the root sense of the word, from the Latin e + ducare, “to lead forth”—to take people out of themselves, thereby widening their horizons, making them at once more resilient and worldlywise.

Welcome to my Wanderjahr

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Dave Does Europe

Crimes Against Animals

Blog Archive

West of the Moon, East of the Sun

At Le Baux

About Me

My List of Places to See in Europe

Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary

The Grand Tour: a Brief History

If you're bored here check out my AlienOrigins story:

Release the chimps!