Ep. 36: The Loss of the Picturesque

If you enjoyed this essay episode, you can subscribe for more at danielleoteri.com. If you’re planning a trip to Italy and would like some expert guidance, book a trip consultation at danielleoteri-italy.com. Lastly, you can always buy me a coffee.Guidebooks have several lives, and despite the internet, they have been diminished but are far from dead. That’s because they are among the only fact-checked pieces of travel material available. When you are paying for a guidebook, you are paying for knowledge. The transaction is clear.Purchasing a guidebook is first a dream. It’s a catalog of possibilities. Then it becomes a strategic tool, a travel companion, and, when it returns home, either a beloved souvenir or totally useless. Often, people will hold on to them until they have to move or really clean and make space, and then Lonely Planet Prague has to go in the trash. And don’t even try to “donate” your 15-year-old guidebook; you know nobody wants it.But guidebooks have another life if you hold on to them long enough. They become a time capsule — an eyewitness account that was also aggressively fact-checked about a world that no longer exists, that you can use to reflect on that world, and see just how much has changed.That’s what has suddenly caused an essay I wrote in August of 2022 to go viral. It’s called “The Before Sunrise Generation,” and I wrote it in response to Gen X clients who were returning to travel now that their kids were leaving home and they had time and money to travel once again. They would ask if they should buy a Eurail pass or stay in a pensione, and I found myself explaining how the way they had traveled in the 1990s really no longer exists.Then this current wave of 90s nostalgia — inspired by “Love Story,” about JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette — has the children of Gen Xers marveling at how free the 90s seemed. One hundred percent of social interactions were in real life, with total presence, nobody on their phone because they didn’t exist. Think about Jesse and Celine, the protagonists of the 1995 film Before Sunrise. They start talking while riding the train, and decide to get off together in Vienna, and spend the night wandering the city and talking. Nobody is tracking their location, and no photos are taken. Two strangers on a train, just figuring it out. If this movie were set in the present day, maybe they’d meet in line for a much-delayed Ryanair flight and maybe start talking only if they had been there so long their phone batteries died.But the thing that today seems so old school and authentic at one point, the vulgar new thing.We Will Simply DriftPrior to rail travel, making the Grand Tour of Italy required private transportation, personal invitations, and letters of introduction. You had to be a person of means and education. Trains democratized travel. And then another industry emerged to meet that new tourist: the guidebook. Baedeker guides, first published in Germany, were famous for their red cloth covers. They were comprehensive guides to cities and rural places, and they removed the need for a letter of introduction forever. They liberated people from relying solely on local guides who were only available to elite networks. The term “Baedekering” could be used with the same snark I sometimes reserve for TikTok tourism. In E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, “Baedeker” is a codeword for the pedantic sightseeing that Forster portrayed as typical of the English touring Italy. It’s funny that they were portrayed as kind of low-brow, because they were very dense with information on art and history, and were written by specialists. They were especially praised for their German precision, which was exactly what made them fall out of favor after World War II. German precision was uh, no longer a virtue. Early in the story, Lucy is shown studying Baedeker’s Handbook to Northern Italy and committing “to memory the most important dates of Florentine history.” Later, she meets an eccentric lady novelist who disapproves of such solemnity and tells her, “No, you are not to look at your Baedeker. We will simply drift.”Overtourism in 1909?The author Henry James was not a fan of the new train-traveling tourist. In 1909, he wrote Italian Hours, where he decried that Venice was overrun by tourists, totally devoid of authenticity — that the sentimental tourist’s sole quarrel with his Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone, to be ori