I got bitten by the travel bug, and in a whirlwind tour of Rome, Florence, Pisa, Cinque Terre, and Venice these last two weeks, I scratched the itch so completely that I am glutted—at least for now—on pasta, anchovies, wine, and Neoclassical sculptures.
This was my second trip to Italy. I believed, and everyone assured me, that October would be a quiet month. But it soon became clear that we were all remembering a different time. Compared to my first trip in the summer of 2016, there were at least twice as many tourists during this supposedly off-peak month.
Who were all these people with disposable incomes and no kids in school? It was easy to complain about them: how they gobbled up all the tickets to major sites and snagged the hottest restaurant reservations. But the inescapable irony, of course, was that I was one of them.
On this trip, more than any other, I felt moments of pure bliss—the clichéd “life is good” kind of bliss—alongside moments of self-loathing. I felt a constant struggle between the instinct to follow the crowd (“that restaurant has lots of people sitting outside—it must be very good”) and aversion to the mobs gathered at certain bars and restaurants as if led there by an invisible Pied Piper. If a place has no crowd, it can’t be as good, can it? Right, but then you realize how silly it is to optimize to the nth degree.
Tourism brings out in me—and others, clearly—an urge to consume the best a city has to offer, to optimize for both quality and completeness. You want to go to the most famous museums, taste the best carbonara, hike the most scenic trail, etc. You also want to experience as much breadth as possible: sample all the local specialties and hit up all the major attractions. The constant crush of people made me feel like I was in a rat race to find the biggest, smelliest cheese before the next person sniffed it out. And so I found myself looking askance at all the people around me while cringingly recognizing myself as one of them.
Where does this urge to experience the very best come from? It’s easy to blame the usual culprit, social media, which propagates idealized images of what our life could be like, thus manufacturing the “fear of missing out.”
It makes me wonder: would we be as relentless in our pursuit of superlative experiences if we were forbidden to post, write or talk about them? I think the desire to share our joy with loved ones is a motivating drive to seek out pleasure. Perhaps it’s a remnant of our tribal instinct to pass on knowledge of where the most bountiful fruit-bearing shrubs are (the obvious difference, of course, being I’m not going to die if I don’t find the best carbonara).
But I think the real driver behind this phenomenon is the incredible ease of accessing information. Google, Tripadvisor, and Yelp reviews, plus all those travel experts and bloggers, curate the best recommendations, making it possible for us to fast-track our way to optimal bliss.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Tourism is distinguished from exploration in that tourists follow a “beaten path,” benefit from established systems of provision, and, as befits pleasure-seekers, are generally insulated from difficulty, danger, and embarrassment.
That’s not to say that tourism is without discomfort. The very attempt to follow a beaten path optimized for pleasure has created its own kind of pain: lining up under the sun for an hour to get into the Colosseum, passive-aggressively hovering over the table that looks like it’s about to free up at a popular paninoteca, rushing to catch the train to Florence so you can make your 11:30 a.m. booking at the Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David because it was the only spot left.
An entire city’s infrastructure can be designed to facilitate and profit from tourism, making it less possible to simply wander because everything from buses and trains to museums and restaurants must be booked in advance, creating the feeling of being in a rush even when you’re on vacation.
What do we lose by hyper optimizing? A sense of spontaneity and serendipity, certainly: that “magical” feeling where you stumble upon a violin performance in a quiet square or walk into a random bar and have a heartwarming conversation with the owner over delicious cicchetti. But for every one of these unplanned magical experiences, you are going to endure ten mediocre or disappointing experiences, so the calculus for the masses is clear: it’s much more reliable to turn to Google or Tripadvisor.
Unlike Agnes Callard’s much-debated case against travel, this is not a repudiation of tourism. I think it’s important to travel, and many people in many countries rely on tourists for their livelihood. Being a tourist is inescapable in certain contexts, but I don’t know how to be one without feeling somewhat uneasy. There’s tremendous fun and education to be gained, but I also feel spoiled by the indulgences so easily afforded by technology. From selfie sticks to labyrinthine timed entry lines, tourism has become a sort of farce, a comedy of our modern times.
I love the way you write Elaine! ❤️