La Dolce Vita? Italy By Rail, 1839-1914
Diana Webb looks into the pleasures and pitfalls of an early tourist experience.
In the 1840s Charles Dickens observed and unforgettably caricatured the English members of an early package-tour doing the rounds of Rome; he supposed that they had been brought from London in nine or ten days. This was soon to change dramatically. The Baptist minister Samuel Manning, revisiting Italy in the 1870s, observed that now 'Turin may be easily reached from London in thirty-six hours. It is not long since the distance from London to York occupied the same time.' In Alps and Sanctuaries, first published in 1881. Samuel Butler remarked: 'Wednesday morning, Fleet Street; Thursday evening, a path upon the quiet mountain side, under the over- spreading chestnuts, with Lombardy at one's feet.’
Butler was conscious not only of the immense acceleration of the pace of travel which had taken place in the past generation, hut of its significance on the time-scales of the world's history:
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