This book is about how one can, in a lifetime, experience the world as directly as possible. It is a practical matter; travel takes time and money. The earth is a big place, and one must be selective about what one sees and how one travels. For us travel has been a lifetime progression, starting with student budgets, then building on corporate travel, and progressing to less accessible locales. As we became seniors, we were more limited in physical adventure, but more able to experience upscale lodgings and to engage local experts. Each of these stages afforded its own viewpoint and enriched the experience of the accessible world. Beyond having enjoyed the great journey ourselves, we have shared it both with children and grandchildren.

When Peter asked Ellen to marry him some fifty years ago she asked what he thought their life would be like. He answered, I will show you the world. Their own Grand Tour has taken them to seven continents and over a hundred thirty countries, and to favorite sites many dozens of times. Their love of history, geography and wildlife has led them to explore the Polar Regions, the African savanna, and the ruins of great civilizations. In this volume, they recount not only the best venues but share their practical insights into how to plan a perfect trip.

For members of the social elite in 18th-century England, extended travel for pleasure came to be considered part of an ideal education as well as an important symbol of social status. Italy, and especially Rome - a fashionable, exciting, and comfortable city - became the focus of such early tourists' interest. In this book, historian Jeremy Black recreates the actual tourist experiences of those who travelled to Italy on a Grand Tour. Relying on the private diaries and personal letters of travellers, rather than on the self-conscious accounts of literary travellers who wrote for wider audiences, the book presents an authentic picture of how British tourists experienced Italy, its landscapes, women, food, music, Catholicism, and more. illustrations, the book highlights the discrepancy between the idealised view of the Grand Tour and its reality: what people were meant to do was not necessarily what they did, what the guide books described as splendid was not always so perceived. Black quotes British visitors as they reflect on their trips, and he discusses what their Italian experiences meant to them. And he considers the intriguing effects of tourism on British culture during this most exciting of centuries.

The Grand Tour, a customary trip of Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity. 0Examining testimony as written by Grand Tourists, tutors and their families, Goldsmith demonstrates that the Grand Tour educated elite young men in a wide variety of skills, virtues and masculine behaviours that extended well beyond polite society. She argues that dangerous experiences were far more central to the Tour as a means of constructing Britain's next generation of leaders than has previously been examined. Influenced by aristocratic concepts of honour and inspired by military leadership, elites viewed experiences of danger and hardship as powerfully transformative and therefore as central to the process of constructing masculinity.0Far from viewing danger as a disruptive force, Grand Tourists willingly tackled a variety of social, geographical and physical perils, gambling their way through treacherous landscapes; scaling mountains, volcanoes and glaciers; and encountering war and disease. Through the study of danger, Goldsmith offers a revision of eighteenth-century elite masculine culture and the critical role the Grand Tour played within this.

Shedding light on an important and neglected topic in childhood studies, Anja Müller interrogates how different concepts of childhood proliferated and were construed in eighteenth-century periodicals and satirical prints. In examining links between text and image, Müller uncovers the role these media played in the genealogy of childhood prior to the 1790s, challenging the myth that situates the origin of childhood in late eighteenth-century England.

Travel and tourism 'stories' have been told and recorded within every culture, in every period of oral and written history, and across the breadth of the fact/fiction continuum. Taking two broad themes as its starting point - travellers and their narratives, and place narratives in travel and tourism - the book has a deliberately wide scope, with different chapters addressing the subject through various relevant 'lenses' and in relation to a number of different contexts. The narratives discussed include both historical and contemporary, as well as 'real-life' and fictional, narratives contained within travel writing, travel and tourism stories and different types of media. In relation to the principal themes of the book, some chapters also explore the importance of collecting memorabilia and image making in the recording, remembering, writing, telling or disseminating of stories about travel and tourism experiences and some examine the ways in which travel and tourism narratives may construct and reinforce personal, collective and place identities. The whole book is marked by an over-arching concern for narrative interpretation as a means of understanding, and providing a new perspective on, travel and tourism.