Between the end of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Grand Tour, a training journey undertaken by the scions of aristocratic families, at first English and then from all over Europe, to get to know the territories and people of the Old Continent, had Italy as its most sought-after destination and the crowning glory; longed for with the traits of a classical yet expressionistic, stately and picturesque dream, the cradle of the Greco-Roman civilization and of the Renaissance, exotic in a way, backward, almost barbarized by centuries of decadence. Thus tourism was born, and it was born in the “Bel Paese”, which inspired a generation of travelers and intellectuals, Goethe in the lead, the ideal of an inimitable perfection because it is spontaneous, lively, natural.
