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Coryat's Crudities: Background Despite the ridicule he endured in his own lifetime, Thomas Coryat of Odcombe - an English traveller and mild eccentric, who in 1608 undertook the 1,975-mile walk to Venice and subsequently wrote an account 'Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in Five Moneth's Travels' in order to impress the court of Henry, Prince of Wales - set the model for a self-improving journey to view the arts and culture of Europe, and has been credited with beginning the craze for the Grand Tour. From the 18th century onwards, the Grand Tour, notably to places of cultural and aesthetic interest and lasting anything between a few months to eight years, was regarded as a necessary part of the "completion" of education for wealthy British nobleman and cultured gentleman (and hence most major British artists). During the Tour, young men (and later chaperoned women) learned about the politics, culture, art and antiquities of neighbouring countries, and spent their time sightseeing, studying, and shopping. Even though the term "Tourist" was only first used as an official term in 1937 by the League of Nations (defined as someone "travelling abroad for periods of over 24 hours", and later tellingly further defined by the World Tourism Organisation as "someone who travels at least fifty miles from home for the purpose of recreation"), nowadays the term when prefixed by the word "Art" is used pejoratively. 'A tourist's experience of a city will inevitably be of a completely different order to that of one of its residents. Whilst the city dweller is able to intuitively and instinctively gain a sense of the history and character of their home town from its smallest and most banal details, a tourist has to work harder, and to examine instead those more obviously symbolic features - the buildings, the traditions and the cultural signposts that betray the complex nature of a particular urban metropolis.'
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