The Grand Tour, on two wheels.

From about the 1660s until the railways came, a young Englishman of means was not considered finished until he had been abroad. He set off in his late teens or at about twenty, with a tutor, a servant or two and a great deal of his father's money, and stayed away for anything from a few months to two or three years. It was, people said, the best way to complete a gentleman's education.

The route barely changed in a century. Across the Channel by sailing packet, which could take a day and a half in bad weather. Paris, for French, dancing, fencing and riding. Then over the Alps and down through Turin, Florence and Venice to Rome for the ruins, and on to Naples for Pompeii and Vesuvius. Home through Vienna, Dresden and Berlin to Holland. The point was not rest. It was to stand in front of the things you had only read about.

Not everyone was convinced. Adam Smith thought the young traveller "commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated" than he left. But the habit lasted until the French Revolution and Napoleon's armies closed the Continent in the 1790s. When peace returned in 1815 the roads filled again, this time with people who were not aristocrats. Steamships and railways followed, Thomas Cook ran his first excursion train in 1841 and his first Continental tour in 1855, and the Grand Tour quietly turned into what we now just call travel.