The grand overtourism

The ever-changing face of holidays

Statues of glass—all shivered—the long file⁠
Of her dead Doges are declined to dust;⁠
But where they dwelt, the vast and sumptuous pile⁠
Bespeaks the pageant of their splendid trust;⁠
Their sceptre broken, and their sword in rust,⁠
Have yielded to the stranger: empty halls, 
Thin streets, and foreign aspects, such as must⁠
Too oft remind her who and what enthrals, 
Have flung a desolate cloud o’er Venice’ lovely walls.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

For over a century, the grand canals of Venice stood out as an unmissable stop for travellers all across Europe. Many of these travellers were taking part in what came to be known as the Grand Tour, a popular journey around the cultural hotspots of Europe undertaken by young male aristocrats, with Italy as the centrepiece of the experience. Particularly popular amongst the British upper class, Venice was a staple of the Grand Tour, with its beauty, grandeur and eventual decadence serving as an exemplar for the moral and aesthetic education of noble youths. 

The era of the Grand Tour, generally defined as between the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth century, saw the collapse of the Republic of Venice as a centre of power in the Mediterranean. The experience of the first few fledgling participants in this immersive course of classical antiquity and the most refined aspects of European culture could not be more starkly contrasted by those who arrived after 1797, in the wake of the destruction of the Republic by the combined forces of Napoleon and Habsburg Austria. From then on, Venice, a shadow of its former self, was passed between various powers until it was ultimately incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy in 1866. The experience of Venice from the perspective of its visitors and sojourners has oscillated immensely over the past few centuries. Nevertheless, during both its rise and fall, the eyes of outsiders have always traced their way through the city’s canals and alleyways. 

It is in these winding streets that we find the first ‘tourists’ in the modern understanding of the term (which is etymologically derived from the ‘tour’ of the Grand Tour). Those bright-eyed European aristocrats who sought to parse every fresco and epitaph from Bellini onwards are a far cry from the wheeled-luggage-laden AirBnB dwellers of the present, but that is nevertheless where they find their descendants. These men defined what it meant to be a tourist: they had developed the traditional vision of an itinerary from a pilgrimage to the Seven Pilgrim Churches of Rome or the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain to a post-Renaissance, humanist ideal of erudition and intellectual fulfilment (or as the historian Edward Gibbon wrote, ‘According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.’) Foreign travel was, for these privileged few, an aesthetic expedition to delineate the inner mechanisms of the cultural landmarks of European civilisation, the Western edges of the Platonic ideal of Beauty. 

One such traveller was the English Romantic poet (and later Greek folk hero) Lord Byron. Arriving in Venice in 1818, he lamented the loss of the power and might of the pearl of the Adriatic, feeling only the echoes of a city once drenched in splendour. He nevertheless managed to find beauty in the decay,

In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more, ⁠
And silent rows the songless Gondolier; ⁠
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, ⁠
And Music meets not always now the ear: ⁠
Those days are gone—but Beauty still is here. ⁠
States fall—Arts fade—but Nature doth not die, ⁠
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear, ⁠
The pleasant place of all festivity, 
The Revel of the earth—the Masque of Italy!

Byron’s tourism became symbolic of the Grand Tour custom as a whole, and his capacity to elucidate the beauty in Venice’s decline is a hallmark of his Romantic poetry. In Byron, we see the paragon of the original definition of a tourist: he who is able to draw from his experiences in foreign lands for the purposes of spiritual, moral and aesthetic enlightenment. The practice of tourism, in theory therefore, should serve the purpose of the advancement of one’s own intellect, and act as a salve for the soul. 

The young gentlemen who embarked on the Grand Tour were intrinsically engaged in the act of conservation; in bearing witness to the finest examples of European patrimony, they collectively began an early form of curation. The programme of the Grand Tour, at least theoretically and metaphorically, is the most expansive and vibrant collection of arts and culture ever conceived, and its participants enshrined these sites as beacons of cultural excellence in a way that was never previously expressed. Transnational, transcultural, transcendental, the telos of the Grand Tour, its final destination, is self-referential as it seeks only the proliferation of itself as an object of aesthetic experience. The participant in the Grand Tour takes from its destinations only impressions of Beauty and returns to his native land to create further impressions of its Beauty, which then engender the touristic ideal and immortalise it through the literary-artistic medium, all the while never leaving a mark on its physical environs. The tourists of the Grand Tour were indebted to the cities on its itinerary and as such cleared their debts through a mimetic process which only aided in enriching the artistic and cultural value of the places they had visited. In this way, the Grand Tour could be conceived as an act of service, of conservation, for a higher aesthetic vision which as a principle had an ennobling function both on the tourist and his destination.

In the twenty-first century, we are some distance away from the Romantic, aristocratic nonpareil of the tourist. When compared with its early modern roots, the contemporary phenomenon of tourism is almost completely unrecognisable and has created a litany of problems both on a local and international scale. Venice was once one of the focal points of the Grand Tour; today it is at the epicentre of the international overtourism crisis. Despite being a major source of income for Venice, the tourism industry is pushing the city to the brink and leaving its inhabitants to face the very real possibility of unmitigated disaster. 

The fate of Venice in the present day would have been inconceivable to Lord Byron and his fellow tourists in the nineteenth century, as would the primary motive for contemporary tourism: consumption. The tourist is in many ways the true child of our age, it is the apotheosis of the conspicuous consumption of a throwaway culture. Here today, gone tomorrow, the tourist has little investment in the community he visits other than its most superficial qualities, which even then find themselves watered down into the crudest forms through the practice of profiteering. Indeed, death may come to Venice not because of the incursions of mad, Habsburgian princes or Ottoman raids, but on account of the mindless consumption of throngs of tourists who see Venice as little more than one of the many places to tick off the ‘bucket list’. Unlike the first tourists on the Grand Tour, the goal is simply to be in Venice, rather than to exist there (or, as the social theorist Zygmunt Bauman writes, ‘… the tourist is on the move […] he is everywhere he goes in, but nowhere of the place he is in’). 

A radical reorientation of what it means to be a tourist in the twenty-first century is necessary. This is not a call for us to return to the past, where the privilege of travel was the sole preserve of an aristocratic élite, but rather to address the needs of the present. If we want cities of sublime beauty such as Venice to survive, modern tourism must learn from its humanist, erudite predecessor and focus on preservation, enrichment and cultural investment. How this can be done in the age of mass movement of people and enormous populations is a question we must still contend with. But we must face the reality that unbridled consumption and mass accessibility to sites such as St. Mark’s Square are not realistic or desirable on a planet of almost eight billion people. 

Any such solution to the reduction in overtourism however must be in keeping with the Romantic spirit of the original ideals of the Grand Tour, and must be available to all, in that access to places such as Venice cannot be based on financial resources alone. The answer is not to turn Venice into the playground of the rich but to reevaluate both the quality of the experience of the city and what a term like ‘accessibility’ actually means in the context of contemporary tourism. Initiatives such as ticketing for entry offer an alternative to the present chaos—the sheer number of tourists must go down, but this decrease cannot be predicated on the price people are willing to pay (hence ideas like a lottery system may seem more appealing).¹ There are democratic solutions to the issues we face, however in order for them to be truly representative of the city, the voices of the residents of Venice must be heard first and foremost (after all, one cannot have a democracy without the demos).

In any case, tourism must return to its essence as a spiritual art form, one which can be cultivated not just by aristocrats but by all those enamoured by the vitality of art and culture. Without this, what we hold dear will collapse before us, and we will be forced to stare into what remains: the cold, dead eyes of consumption. 

At the hands of a Napoleonic alliance, the Republic of Venice fell. At the hands of a Republic of Letters, the city of Venice can be saved.

Finlay Darlington-Bell

1. Venice City Council intends to trial a €5 fee for day-trippers next year.