Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-c654p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-28T04:41:42.072Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The Alps and the Grand Tour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2021

William Bainbridge
Get access

Summary

Abstract

This chapter traces the origin of the symbols that allowed for the transformation of the Dolomites into a ‘new playground’. This playground emerged not only as an alternative destination to the Western Alps, but also as an alternative ‘community of practice’, built through the recirculation of interaction rituals historically attached to the Grand Tour. Framed around the concept of ‘cult geography’ three ingredients are here identified: the distinction between ‘mountain gloom’ and ‘mountain glory’, the classical idea of ‘grand scenery’, and the iconic notion of ‘romantic rocks’. The Grand Tour serves as the first matrix of topographic memory for producing the first set of iconic symbols recirculating in the ‘invention’ of the Dolomites.

Keywords: Grand Tour, grand scenery, romantic rocks, mountain gloom, mountain glory, Salvator Rosa

The country is such an extravagant mixture of the horrid and the tame, of the flat and precipitous, that the eye cannot hope to find anything more pleasing.

− Salvator Rosa

Writing in 1878, on the pages of the magazine Belgravia, in a period in which the memory of the Grand Tour was ready to become history, Thomas Hardy made a prediction concerning the scenery future tourists would longingly seek in the fast approaching new century:

The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes of Scheveningen (1920, p. 5).

That Hardy was wrong, in his prediction, is a fact. Tourists today may flock to Iceland, but they still highly revere the sunny ‘vineyard and myrtle gardens of South Europe’; it would be equally preposterous to assume that those who do go to Iceland are forcibly the ‘more thinking among mankind’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Topographic Memory and Victorian Travellers in the Dolomite Mountains
Peaks of Venice
 , pp. 27 - 50
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×