In Rome, all roads seem to lead to the Trevi Fountain. On my last visit, every other time I asked Google Maps to figure out a route to sites in the historic center of the city, the app coursed me through the tourist magnet commissioned by Pope Clement XII in the 18th century. If I had never seen the Trevi before, I would be grateful, but three round trips on one day past the baroque aquatic fantasy made me rococo loco. The standing room in front of the fountain was an intake pond for tourists streaming in from all over. I was drowning in the tussle and drenched in summery sweat — not all my own. Ick and eek. This was just the start of Rome’s high season.
Foreign tourists like to complain there are too many of themselves. However, the locals do too — and have horror stories to tell. A grainy CCTV video apparently shows a visitor to the crowded Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, awkwardly posing in front of an 18th portrait of a Medici heir only to buckle a bit and tear a hole in the painting with either his hand or elbow. Last summer, the mayor of Rome declared that “there can certainly be no space for hooligans and idiots” after a visitor allegedly used a key to carve his name into a wall of the Colosseum. The previous year, a visitor from Bristol, England, had done the same and pleaded ignorance of the monument’s antiquity. A month ago, there were news accounts of a US tourist who impaled himself on a metal fence while trying to take a selfie at the 1,953-year-old ruin. However, the veracity of those reports has been questioned. For many Italians, it was the perfect fable of comeuppance: Foolish tourist gets punished by his own foolishness.
To be fair, tourists were not the impetus for Italy’s punitive law last year against defacing art, monuments and scenic sites — with fines as high as US$70,000. The targets of that legislation were so-called eco-vandals who had gone after the Trevi and Milan’s La Scala opera house in the name of saving the planet. For that matter, it was a tourist who alerted the police to the person who keyed in his name on the Colosseum.
Illustration: Louise Ting
Still, real and imagined offenses committed by tourists have fueled local outrage from Portugal to Japan that verge on xenophobia. In Tokyo, one celebrity called tourists and migrants “invasive species,” and speculated that visitors could overstay and eventually dilute Japan’s unique culture. A lot of the blame for the current flood of revenge travel can be fairly assigned to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the end of which released pent-up demand. Many countries at first welcomed the profusion of profit until visitor numbers and bad behavior swirled out of control. However, the roots of visitors-versus-locals go back much farther in history.
The nature of tourism — even before the English word was coined in the late 18th century — was always bedeviling. When Dante sketched out his eighth circle of hell, he had horned demons whipping queues of sinners to keep them in line, comparing them to the crowds of pilgrims in Rome who were policed into one-way lanes as they crossed back and forth on the bridge of Castel Sant’Angelo. Even back in the 14th century, the tourist hordes were problematic, despite being encouraged by the popes themselves, in part to juice local businesses.
Pilgrims were the first tourists — and they traveled not only to gawk at the holy sites, but to buy blessings and souvenirs and, often, to fraternize with the locals (yes, they did have sexual relations). The ex-mistress of Pope Alexander VI made a healthy living by running inns in Rome, one of which incorporated the pontiff’s family crest into its own coat of arms and still stands near the Campo de’ Fiori. The British upper classes set off on their own elitist Grand Tours in the 18th century, eating, drinking and fornicating their way through the great cities of Europe. However, it was not until the middle of the 19th century that Thomas Cook scaled up and democratized travel with his family-friendly, respectably middle-class excursions. Cook’s tours pioneered what many today expect from tourism: cocooned experiences where people can remain comfortably and extraterritorially themselves in the middle of a foreign country, perhaps the root of some of today’s privileged behavior among travelers. The tours were also the genesis of an industry that now accounts for about 10 percent of global GDP, including close to 8 percent of Japan’s and more than 10 percent of Italy’s.
So, our so-called crisis has age-old roots. The alleged miscreants are an amalgam of clueless pilgrim, bougie sightseer and loutish scoundrel. The situation is also exacerbated by the super-sizing of expectations by airlines, hotel chains, the luxury business, the restaurant trade and a host of industries whose aim is to separate this mass movement of people from their disposable income. You can blame go-for-growth commerce. It is not ideal, of course. However, everyone has derived some benefit along the route.
The point is to prevent local irritation over bad behavior from going madly off track. Misdeeds — even if committed by a fraction of a fraction — can inspire holier-than-thou ethnocentrism and exclusionary rules. It is important to remember that domestic tourists can behave like yokels too.
So, calm down. Large countries such as France, Italy, Japan and others would find it difficult to restrict tourism without making themselves less attractive — including to their own citizens. The obvious case in point is the US, where anecdote after anecdote of travelers being accosted or detained at the border has led to a decline in tourism. New York City has revised its expectations for international visitors downward by 17 percent. Spending by foreign tourists might come down as much as US$12.5 billion in the US this year, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. Before this round of strictures, travel and tourism made up close to 10 percent of the US$30.5 trillion GDP.
Perhaps, there is a kind of solution to be found in human guides, accredited to personalize tours and save the more hapless visitors from themselves. It is not new, of course. An essay by the English polymath Francis Bacon in 1625 advised travelers to take along “one that hath the language and hath been in the country before; whereby he may be able to tell them what things are worthy to be seen.”
As for disputes and quarrels, he said that “they are with care and discretion to be avoided.” So, behave.
Building a system of capable guides might just end up with more bureaucracy. Tourists should therefore be more conscious of why they are traveling. It is important to get out of one’s comfort zone, to experience a different existence. As Bacon wrote, let the traveler “sequester himself from the company of his countrymen and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where he traveleth.”
My corollary: Skip the generic bucket list and come up with an original one. Do the research. Do not go flowing downstream with the perspiring masses of humanity that know only to stare at the Trevi fountain. The bigger cities — as crowded as they are — almost always have quiet alternatives that allow you to absorb their ethos without suffocating in the equivalent of mosh pits. In Rome, opt for the elegance of the Via Giulia over the coarseness of the Corso.
Being far from the maddening crowds could make all the difference.
Howard Chua-Eoan is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion covering culture and business. He previously served as Bloomberg Opinion’s international editor and is a former news director at Time magazine. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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