The wealthy tourists who streamed into Rome as part of their Grand Tour focused their energies on visiting ancient Roman monuments, viewing Renaissance and contemporary…
Mastering Souvenirs for Wealthy Patrons on the Grand Tour
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Netherlandish artists regularly visited Italy to view works produced during the Italian Renaissance and to learn from practicing artists.…
The Grand Tour
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…