ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century afforded a kaleidoscopic vision of the world mediated by the newest technological inventions: trains, steamships and cameras. Movement and the new spaces of modernity were measured and captured. Travel to places for the purpose of architectural discovery has been an activity recounted and documented for centuries, accelerating with the democratization of travel as mass tourism developed as a leisure activity during the nineteenth century. The activity of travel is arguably a quest to unearth the foreign and unfamiliar with the possibility of a mild, or even a rude cultural awakening. The image is likely to be of the building itself or its location of the architectural place and decidedly not the contents. It follows that if architectural buildings of magisterial scale designed by important international architects are increasingly what tourists desire to see, then it behoves us to investigate at close range the network of narratives and memories created by tourists as they chart their cultural itineraries.
