ABSTRACT
Travel involves both physical and imaginative displacements, experienced through an accumulation of singular and transitory moments which require a contemplative stillness to absorb and reflect upon. As an image that provided sights uncommon or unobtainable in everyday life, the panorama has critical and significant relationships to travel and architecture. The panorama's relationship with travel will also be considered through a brief comparison with vedute, a genre of small-scale topographical prospects collected by aristocratic travelers as take-home mementos of their grand tour experiences. Aristocratic travel since the sixteenth century had been associated with the grand tour, which laid the basis for an enthusiasm for Italian painting and spawned a flourishing international market of guidebooks. In the 1850s, Charles Dickens poked lightly ironic fun at the phenomenon of the panorama supplanting the need for actual travel when he created a peripatetic character by the name of Mr Booley.
