The age of the Grand Tour of Europe—where the sons, and occasionally daughters, of aristocrats and wealthy merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spent a year or more touring the Continent to become cultured—marks the birth of souvenirs as we think of them today.
Pilgrim Badges
How, why, and what we collect as souvenirs has a history. The human impulse to collect physical objects with a direct connection to special experiences,…
The Origins of Souvenir
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word souvenir in English originally comes from French, where it has a long history. Appearing first in Old…