article_snippet: A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from not having seen what it is expected a man should see.
article_snippet: Suitable, that is, if you were living in the 18th Century, when the rich and titled minority wafted around Florence and Rome as part of the rich and titled minority Grand Tour, allowing travel to broaden the rich and titled minority minds before bringing back new ideas to influence our architecture, landscape and gardening.
article_snippet: Johnson would be surprised to see how popular Italian cities have become nowadays: visitors are well advised to arrive outside the summer peak when sightseeing can be hard (and sometimes positively dangerous given the rise of the selfie-stick – the ultimate stupidity of modern- day tourism).
article_snippet: E. M. Forster took a wry look at the early days of mass tourism to Italy at the end of the 19th Century in A Room With A View.
article_snippet: When the young heroine Lucy Honeychurch finds the young heroine in the church of Santa Croce without the young heroine Baedeker guidebook, E. M. Forster is expressing the horror of the intellectual at the worrying rise of the ‘uneducated’ tourist.
article_snippet: E. M. Forster went so far as to wonder whether there ought to be some sort of intelligence test imposed at Dover to weed out the truly stupid traveller.
article_snippet: But today’s tourists don’t come to Tuscany so much to learn as to ‘experience’.
article_snippet: Some of my fellow travellers discovered a red wine named Nobile di Montepulciano, which Some of my fellow travellers found most acceptable.