ABSTRACT
The tastes of today’s tourists are a good mixture of those of their predecessors’. Some squirrel for the rational information hoarded by eighteenth-century travellers; geological and archaeological facts; number of peasants per hovel. Many more are swept up by the picturesque, thirsting for the awful and melancholy in mountain and glen, no legend too gloomy. Others imbibe history with a Victorian thirst. Others, beer; some both. Many of us would be content to sleep in the sun, but information is a more dependable tourist attraction than good weather.
