Putting context back into travel, OR why contextualizing travel is cool

Now, you know I'm not a fan of guides (see this post) and my recent observation of a tour guide who stopped at each key sight at the Roman Forum to read passages from a guidebook to her bored tour group only reaffirmed many of my beliefs on guides and guided tours. Yet Context Travel is on an altogether different level. For starters, they prefer to call their guides 'docents', an American term for university professors or lecturers, reflecting the qualifications and expertise of their guides, many of whom are scholars who moved to Italy to complete doctorates on the subjects they're leading tours on. And they come from a wide variety of disciplines, including archaeologists, chefs, architects, artists, authors, and historians. While some of their walks involve stimulating strolls through Rome's long history, other offerings range from a literary discussion about Dante as you wander Florence's streets to an introduction to Roman cuisine while exploring lively local markets, along with lighter activities from drawing workshops at Castel Sant' Angelo to jogging tours through Rome's city streets. We did an inspiring and enlightening Italian language workshop in a buzzy local enoteca, an engaging walk through ancient Rome, a fun bar-hopping introduction to Italian wine, and an exclusive private shopping tour to visit some of Rome's best bespoke artisans. Context's owner Paul Bennett says: "Our walking seminars are, on some levels, love songs, paeans, and odes to a place that fascinates us day by day. Like Cupid with his arrows, Context events are designed to make you fall in love with Rome." We certainly came away from each and every engaging and eye-opening experience feeling like somehow had helped us gently scrape away a layer or two of the city so that we knew and loved it better than we had before. Don't you love it when that happens?

Guidebooks to ‘the picturesque’: creating a new generation of traveller

Travel writer, artist, teacher, and reverend, William Gilpin obsessively collected drawings and sketched, and, as a student at Oxford in 1748, self-published ‘A Dialogue upon the Gardens at Stow in Buckinghamshire’. With practical tips for travellers on how they could get the most out of their visits to the country and best enjoy the scenery, the book was probably the world’s first travel guide. A unique combination of guidebook and reflective essay on aesthetics, it explored Gilpin’s ideas to do with ‘the picturesque’. A mad fan of landscapes – the craggier, more rugged and wilder, the better – Gilpin ruminated on the beauty of nature and perception in a way that hadn’t been done before. In his ‘Essay on Prints’ on landscape painting, published 20 years later, Gilpin defined ‘the picturesque’ as the kind of beauty that pleases us when we look at a painting, and formulated (often amusing) full-blown theories on picturesque beauty. Gilpin travelled widely during the 1760s and 1770s and on his trips began to apply his theories to what he was seeing, filling journals with sketches and thoughts, which he then circulated among friends. A decade later in 1782 Gilpin published ‘Observations on the River Wye’, based on a summer there, followed by ‘Observations on the Lake District and the West of England’, a guidebook series in the making… Both books were incredibly popular, inspiring people to travel to the English countryside simply for a spot of ‘scenic touring’, and to enjoy the landscapes in the ways Gilpin suggested – in much the way contemporary guidebooks direct us to today. When Gilpin’s readers travelled they too spent their time sketching and talking about their experiences in the way they might chat about visiting a gallery and the paintings they’d seen. I like to wonder whether Gilpin was created this new generation of traveller or whether he simply preached to the converted (no pun intended) and wrote for a readership of travellers like himself.