Course Description
How did the Grand Tour invent modern tourism, and how has tourism shaped Italian cultural identity, heritage preservation, social class, and national memory from the eighteenth century to the present?
The Grand Tour was one of the most influential cultural institutions of early modern Europe. Beginning in the seventeenth century, elite travelers journeyed through Italy seeking artistic refinement, cultural capital, and intellectual development. Their experiences helped shape Western ideas about history, beauty, civilization, and travel itself.
This course examines Italy as both a historical destination and a contemporary laboratory for understanding tourism, cultural heritage, identity formation, and globalization. Through literature, history, art history, sociology, urban studies, and tourism studies, students will investigate how travelers have constructed images of Italy over the last three centuries and how Italians have responded to those representations.
Students will analyze travel narratives, visual culture, historical documents, films, and contemporary debates concerning mass tourism, heritage preservation, authenticity, migration, and cultural memory. During the spring semester, students will develop a research project focused on a major theme related to the Grand Tour and modern tourism. While abroad, students will conduct field observations, collect evidence, maintain a structured research journal, and complete a substantial analytical project connecting course concepts to firsthand observations in Italy.
The course uses Italy not simply as a destination but as a case study through which students investigate broader questions concerning cultural exchange, globalization, historical memory, and the ethics of tourism.
For more information on the travel portion of the two-semester program, please refer to its Study Abroad page.