The Grand Tour: 1977

BELL, PEARL K.

THE GRAND TOUR: 1977 BY PEARL K. BELL In the past month I have been traveling in Israel, Greece and Italy, and I am not at all certain that travel —in the old-fashioned sense of going somewhere...

...Whether the reverence was for Michelangelo or God was not clear, and the request for silence seemed equally unfocused...
...Even in a balmier and migrant season, like the unstable spring of early April, one could in the late 1950s plan a rather casual visit to some of the marvels of Europe—Versailles and Venice, Athens and Rome—and be reasonably sure that, once there, it was the Sun King's palace or Santa Maria della Salute or the Erechtheion or the Michelangelo Moses one would be able to savor in an uninterrupted feast of scrutiny, rather than a jostling body-to-body competition with gaggles of other tourists...
...As recently as 20 years ago, in fact, a dedicated traveler with more hours than money could wander at a relaxed tempo through the Alhambra or the Vatican Museums on a cold winter day and hear few footsteps not his own echoing on the hoary stone...
...Rome is so raucously noisy that the country quiet of Tivoli seemed an oasis of restorative tranquility...
...Tourism has become a fertile source of national income...
...if these hordes of spendthrift Americans and English and Germans and French are willing to shell out all that money and effort to see the sights, the host countries will do their best to tart up their attractions —witness the nightly son et lumiere performances at the Acropolis...
...In the melancholy beauty to be seen in the tattered remains of the classical era lay Western civilization's priceless heritage, and those incunabula had to be devoured and appreciated in situ...
...As a result, these packaged deals have become a vastly lucrative business in every season...
...At such moments, when the mind's ear is able to detect something of the music unheard for centuries in these bare ruined choirs, the art of travel once again acquires its unique and poignant vindication...
...THE GRAND TOUR: 1977 BY PEARL K. BELL In the past month I have been traveling in Israel, Greece and Italy, and I am not at all certain that travel —in the old-fashioned sense of going somewhere to take a long and tranquil look at the buildings, paintings, monuments, landscapes, and relics of the past that make a place interesting—is any longer possible...
...Long before the days of portable cameras and picture postcards—the racks now stand like brightly colored sentinels at the exit point of every tourist attraction in Europe, however minor or dull—travelers craved images that could be taken home as souvenirs of where they had been and the great sights they had seen...
...When one stands on the exquisitely reconstructed terraces of Yemin Moshe, where Moses Montefiore built his almshouse in the 1860s, and looks across the Valley of Gehenna to Mount Zion, with the parched hills of Judaea beyond, beckoning their silent promise at the edge of the desert, one feels wholly enclosed in the stony and ageless stillness of the Biblical terrain, alive with the undying legends of creation and law...
...Because oil paintings were expensive and unwieldy baggage, printmakers like Piranesi did a thriving business in thickly detailed engravings of the local scene—an early form of the democratization of art...
...Not the best or the worst of reasons for journeying to distant lands, but it is the constantly proliferating numbers of these doughty sightseers that is destroying the once leisurely fulfillments of the art of travel...
...For Goethe and Byron, Hawthorne and Shelley, Ruskin and Keats, and for countless lesser literary and nonliterary pilgrims in pursuit of a sense of history and the continuity of an enduring tradition, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome could be fully savored and understood only by walking in the faded footprints of the ancient past...
...It is an inexhaustibly absorbing city, drenched for centuries in the blood of warring orthodoxies, and its inhabitants are no more at ease in Zion today than they have ever been...
...In this age of jets and charters, of rigidly organized itineraries that have everything from tomorrow's breakfast to Saturday's museum foxily scheduled to suit the largest possible number at fhe smallest possible cost, the sheer difficulty of getting close to, say, the Parthenon long enough to see its sculpture properly has become gravely daunting...
...It was still the Easter season, so the crowds were not surprising...
...In spite" of the crowds and the packaged ranks, the inescapable Cyclopean batteries of cameras, the gravel-voiced guides dispensing their ersatz history, the soughing and screech of the buses, there remain surprises and wonders to behold...
...As the funicular swung us back to earth from the gaunt precipice of Masada, I overheard one Brooklyn lady (in mandatory polyester pants suit) remark to another, "Imagine, in two weeks we're seeing so much we'll have enough to talk about for a whole year...
...Jerusalem is indeed golden, for the sun seems to have bestowed its color and warmth not merely on the stone of the buildings but on the very air of Israel's capital...
...The distant lands themselves have much to answer for...
...to move through the stark hills of the Judaean desert, that landscape bleached by history, with a leisurely fullness of time and attentive solitude that is out of the question today...
...It was surely more possible for those ardently energetic and well-informed tourists of past centuries to see the Parthenon and the Colosseum and the Citadel of David as they are (or were...
...Today the tightly regimented clusters of tour groups are everywhere, clinging in glazed boredom to the hastily improvised "scholarship" of imperfectly polylingual guides...
...In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Grand Tour of Europe was a demanding but vital experience in the education of a cultivated Englishman or German or American...
...In Venice, which has no reason for being but tourism, there are now more guides than pigeons...
...At Masada and Delphi, Mount Sinai and Tivoli, Baden-Baden and Finisterre, the buses are lined up at every ticket gate like elephants in the circus, waiting to roar up and down the mountain roads and narrow city streets with their multitudes, locked into an unalterable fortnight of culture and togetherness...
...Not long after the War, I went to look at the famous ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, and though in 1950 I was certainly not alone in that great room of the Vatican, neither was there then the kind of overefficient regimentation I encountered last month...
...In any event, few of the tourists imperiling their neck muscles to stare up at the ceiling frescos were paying any attention to the appeals—the Chapel seemed as noisy as a football stadium in full cry...
...Since the Vatican Museums contain as much overblown academic mediocrity in the way of painting and sculpture as they do breathaking treasure, I couldn't wait to break loose from that obedient snakelike queue...
...But now one must follow the multilingual arrows directing the shuffling tourist line to march toward the Sistine Chapel, and a few yards before the entrance a recorded voice begins cooing orders in German, Italian, English, and French?visitors must behave "reverently" and "observe silence" while in the Chapel...
...In any case, many of the statues are now wrapped in plastic to prevent further damage by air pollution...
...Over the centuries his views of Rome have exerted so ineradicable an influence that we tend to see such sites as Hadrian's villa, in Tivoli, less as they are than as the artist depicted them...
...Having recently read again Margaret Yourcenar's brilliant philosophical novel, Hadrian's Memoirs, and the dazzling account in Eleanor Clark's Rome and a Villa of the Emperor's lavish retreat, the suggestive fragments of Hadrian's vanished opulence—so frequently sketched by Piranesi—were deeply moving...
...But the visual delights and contrasts—between the reticent grace of the Greek temples and the exuberant baroque splashiness of the Roman fountains—are nevertheless heady and rare...
...No matter...
...And yet it would be less than candid for me to claim that my visits to the three great crucibles of the Western world left me only with the dispirited feeling that travel has become hopelessly unrewarding...
...Thanks to the soaring costs of transportation, hotels and the like, it has now become impossible for the modestly ambitious middle-class traveler to go abroad except as part of prearranged tours that leave absolutely nothing to chance or to individual taste, initiative and pace...
...there the shocks of recognition are esthetic, not emotional...
...Neither in Athens nor in Rome does a Jew feel anything like this visceral entanglement with the flesh and bones of history...
...Piranesi's haunting Vedute di Roma, which now sell for hundreds of dollars a print but were originally drawn for sale to tourists, occasionally represented nothing more actual than the extravagance of the artist's antiquity-intoxicated imagination...
...Despite the exhausting discomfort of travel in the days of ships and carriages, it was considered indispensable to the higher refinements of mind and personality to journey long and far in search of first-hand encounters with the ghostly ruins of Periclean Greece and Roman Italy —and, for the more intrepid souls like Melville, of Biblical Palestine, the subject of his long poem Clarel...

Vol. 60 • May 1977 • No. 11


 
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