1 - The Alps and the Grand Tour
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
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 RosaWriting 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’.
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- Topographic Memory and Victorian Travellers in the Dolomite MountainsPeaks of Venice, pp. 27 - 50Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020