Spaces on the Map, Places of the Mind: The Grand Tour and Classic Modernity
Spaces on the Map, Places of the Mind: The Grand Tour and Classic Modernity

Summary/Abstract: Classic Modernity, aka the Enlightenment, can be regarded as a long symbolic travel of concepts, practices, values and institutions that are constitutive of our Western Civilization world. Newspapers and periodicals, the novel as “the” modern genre par excellence, the public sphere and its sense of conviviality, expanding roads and transport services, ever more diversified forms of domestic comfort, sartorial distinction and educational expectations are as many factors contributing to what we have inherited in the Long Modernity process of which the eighteenth century is a crucial interval. Such public spaces as the coffee house, the pub, the theatre, the opera or the spa, like the stock exchange and the post office, counterbalanced indoor activities favourable to individual assertion and social practices that homologate modern man and woman. Originating in the previous century, the Grand Tour facilitates ample mobility schemes, in principle of the educationalcultural type, but gradually as a form of relaxation. This article looks at how spaces on the map become places of the mind in the process, as well as at how places of the mind find their actual correspondents in spaces on the map and analyses the taxonomic categorization of the landmarks punctuating the Grand Tour. In so doing, it resorts to de Certeau’s theoretical stance for “everyday practices” and evaluates the passage of homology (in)to heterology.

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