Tourism Nostalgia Part 2

There was going to be a series of these posts. I was going to include all of my favorite pictures, and make some kind of personal claim on the places in them, and make some reference to the overcrowding and other vulgar changes brought about in them by our modern age, if I could not quite join in on the lamenting of them. Now of course the crowds are gone from all of these places, perhaps never to return in the numbers that had become common in recent years, which of course would be a positive development, other that it may further decrease the chance of my ever going to any of them again. The photos in this group are from the second volume of the Catholic history survey, which covers the Western story from 1600 to about 1960, so the sites are more modern. They loaded from my phone somewhat out of order, but that does not matter enough that I am going to bother fixing it. 

The scene around the Arch of Triumph doesn't look that different from the old days, at least from the air, though the Elysian Fields I guess has been effectively Times Square for at least forty years now. It's still too iconic a site to leave out of the post.



Brilon, Westphalia, Germany



I admit that I don't know anything about this place, but the old scene at least reminds me of the kind of town in the Czech Republic that we would ride into on our bicycles and drink beer and eat soup and wiener schnitzel in. Which I loved.

Church of St Peter and St Paul, St. Petersburg

Everything looks so clean and restored nowadays. So many experts and culture lovers swarming over and caring for everything. I think I miss the days when everything was neglected and run down and I could imagine I, and a few other earnest and sexy but not especially enterprising people, were the only ones who really cared about all of this stuff.

The view from the other side still has some trees in the picture, but all of the ones I've been able to find aren't allowing me to steal them.

Such a big deal was made of the U.N. in all of my childhood reference books, and it seems so comparatively passe and not a big part of where the world is going now, that I have always kind of wanted to go visit it, especially while it is still an active organization. However I haven't gotten around to doing it yet.

I should note here that this was the very last photograph in the book, the most up-to-date representation of Western Civilization as it appeared in 1962. 

Wall Street, 1929. Probably more crowded then than now.



I can remember walking past Wall Street but I don't think I have ever been on it. It is one place I definitely don't belong anyway, but at the time (I was still in my 20s) I'm sure I felt like I couldn't go there, that somehow I would be exposing myself to existential danger (my upbringing to that point had instilled in me an idea that Wall Street was one of the vortexes of evil in all the world to a would-be artist or serious thinker).

Osnabruck. Another one of these German places from the Thirty Years' War that I do not know that much about but would probably be interested in

That's the place. It is one of my weaknesses, and probably the major real cause of my dissatisfaction thus far with the whole coronavirus episode, that there is all this fun to be had out there in the world that I have largely missed out on, or that I am constantly being prevented from taking part in, in which European and big city traveling plays an outsized part, especially now that I am too old to go partying in places like Ibiza or Thailand or the more decadent Greek Islands. While it is true, as my wife would argue, that spending all your afternoons and evenings lounging around drinking beer even in the most picturesque setting would be a waste of your life, it is also true that some of the happier memories of my life involved doing just this. And as it's been over 20 years now since I have been able to indulge myself in this way I do have a hankering to do it again (as I have a hankering to see a real classic or good adult movie in an actual cinema, or even an auditorium again, which I haven't done in 20 years either). 

In 1990, on my first trip abroad, I did go up in the Eiffel Tower like a typical chump, however I did manage to strike up a conversation with a couple of really beautiful Israeli girls on this occasion. They were in truth such a leap up in glamor from anyone who had ever talked to me on a friendly basis up to that time that I unfortunately was not quite ready to follow through with laying out some appealing post-Eiffel Tower plans that might interest them, as I didn't haven't any, though they did give me an opening to bring the subject up. At the time I thought, well, I was caught off-guard this time, but the next time I find myself chatting up such babes at one of these tourist attractions, I'll be prepared. Of course I never would find myself chatting up any such babes at any tourist attraction or anywhere else ever again.   

How it really is.

How we imagine it (below)

League of Nations Building, Geneva. The idea of international organizations, provided they were Western-dominated, had a hold on the imagination of leaders and educated men in the decades following World War II, even when they were epic failures.

This building still exists, and looks about the same as it did in past days. The inside of it looks to have something of an old European grandeur that the present U.N. lacks (though I also have a certain weakness, entirely rooted in nostalgia, for 1950s American modernism).

Admittedly, this place was built to hold crowds, and attract even the dregs of humanity (to some extent). I love it there, and the whole area around it. A lot of excitement.

Red Square, long view.



I know I have no place to be a snob, but Red Square isn't quite the same now that people who shop at Whole Foods can go there (and come back again to their office park jobs a few days later).



Modern cameras, or perhaps modernity itself, seems to have diminished the effect that many of these monuments have in these old photos.

Maison Lafitte, France

French castles are not one of my particular areas of expertise. 

May Day Parade, Red Square Again!

These epic events did end after 1991 (there is still a military parade on May 9 every year to commemorate the end of World War II), but there was an (apparently?) one-time revival in 2014 that drew 10,000 people.

This Catholic history textbook I got all these pictures from unabashedly hated the International Communist Party and all that they stood for and didn't skip any opportunity to excoriate them in print.

Palace of Versailles

I haven't actually been here. When the crowd is this big, we're all tourist scum, unless maybe you are really good-looking. I hope there is some time of year when it isn't like this. 

St Martin's-in-the-Fields, London. 



This is the church that is right off Trafalgar Square, across the street from the National Gallery, so I have seen it, but I haven't visited it. Due to its location and the fortune of its not having been bombed out during World War II (which fate befell a great many of the 17th and 18th century London churches recognizable to students of English literature) it is one of the most prominent 18th century buildings remaining in the city.

Belvedere Palace, Vienna. 



I have been to a number of the secondary palaces of the Hapsburg family, including Franz Ferdinand's cottage at Konopiste in Bohemia, and Franz Joseph's hunting lodge in Bad Ischl, but I have never made it to Vienna. The treeless, relatively unadorned approach to the gigantic Viennese palaces (Schonbrunn presents similarly in photos) has always struck me as strange, but perhaps the effect is different in person. 

I don't know how to end these kinds of posts, so I'm just going to say "This is the end."

Tourism Nostalgia Part 1

The older I get, it looks less and less like I am ever going to be able to do the kind of extended, leisurely touring that I have long dreamed of doing and have sunk a considerable amount of time in my life in plotting lists and itineraries for. But even if I were to go, I have the sense that the mid-level European travel world of my imagination, of train station hotels and walk-up pensions with faded carpets and curtains and 1960s amenities, of afternoons and evenings lolling about in cafes on the town square and taverns and small wood-paneled restaurants gawking at, if not the beautiful people, more than adequately attractive ones, all at prices manageable for the possessor of American dollars, may largely have ceased to exist even compared to what remained of it in the 90s, especially in the most famous locations. Now of course it is possible that I would find the new contemporary Europe much more exciting and vital than this old one that I am talking about, and certainly it would make my time there more interesting and myself a more attractive figure than if I were reduced to lamenting to just lamenting all of the things that were not there or that I could not afford to do anymore. It is a real disappointment in my life that I am not a more adaptive person. By the time I could study or absorb enough to have any sense of how to enjoy the culture of the present day, it will have long changed into yet something else.
I guess it is difficult to explain to anyone who did not grow up before the internet the imprint that certain books and certain pictures looked upon hundreds and hundreds of times over a period of many years would make on one's mind. That is obviously a common theme of my blogs, the strange desire I seem to have to keep up my relation to these books from my childhood that I looked up to and aspired to enter the world of in some way. This post has a bunch of pictures of Great Historical Sites of Europe taken from my college Western Civilization textbook which was published in the early 1960s. For some reason I have always loved these rather simple pictures, which I imagined was what these places looked like through the eyes of a cultured person who was really respected for his intelligence, which I have had some idea since an early age was the truly highest state that I had any realistic hope of attaining to. I thought I should look at them side by side with some picture of what they look like now, and record my thoughts on it.

1. Ancient amphitheater at Epidaurus. Everything, for me, has to start with Greece, or the Greek world. Look at those dried out, ancient looking hills in the background, and the sense that a traveler trekking across an empty country could just stumble upon this grand, perfect ruin.

I actually cannot find a modern picture of the place where it is overrun with vulgar tourists, commercialism, etc, so maybe it actually is not ruined, and my whole project of lamentation is going to be defeated.

I have seen more stirring old pictures of the Parthenon, but I'm trying establish a mood here.  

This is more like it, although most of these people at least look young, which is more bearable. Still, the romance of communing with the glory that was Athens is probably hard to achieve when there are this many people.

Aqueduct at Segovia. There's a nice little crowd here even in the 50s, but manageable. You're still going to get that centrally-located room and night of outdoor dancing with comparatively elegant people without too much hassle if you want it.

This is the most crowded modern picture I could find, and at least one blogger has written a post describing Segovia as "That Idyllic European Town You've Been Looking For" so maybe there is still hope for me to live out my European fantasies, or some of them anyway, and this will be an optimistic rather than a pessimistic post.

Mausoleum of Theodoric the Ostrogoth at Ravenna. Those trees. I feel like I'm at the end of a classic movie.

I like the 1950s approach better. The whole setting in the modern picture makes the tomb look less substantial, it looks a little like a CCC-era public restroom in a city park.





The cloth hall at Ypres. This building was rebuilt from 1933-1967 after the medieval structure was destroyed during World War I. This picture may be of the original, I can't tell. The solitary man in this picture decked out for an Alpine expedition as he crosses the square is one of my oldest tourism role models. The spirit embodied in this enthusiastic pilgrim will be mine too, someday, I can imagine myself thinking.

More cars now.

Walled Town of Carcassone. Another picture to arouse the leisure-lover's imagination. Another sleepy afternoon in the village just as it's been for the last 600 years. And a long-haired girl sitting on the wall...

I'm just not finding the nightmarish scenes I was hoping for. 

No nightmare here.

Cologne Cathedral. I'm pretty sure this picture must predate World War II.

Kenilworth Castle, England. I love the muddy approach here.

The modern picture somehow always lacks the romance of the older ones, but this place seems to have stayed pretty true to itself. 

Reims Cathedral. I'm going to bet this is still pleasant and civilized. But the neighboring areas, the nightlife, the cafes, those are all dead now, right? It's not possible that I could still find something of what I imagine I have always wanted, is it? 

This is the most crowded picture of Reims Cathedral I could find. Once again, the older picture makes it look so much more grand, but I am sure that it is pretty exciting to see in real life. Most of the famous places I have been to generally were.

Gratuitous Notre Dame picture. One of the central loci of the old Western European dream that so many today are successfully weaning themselves off of. 



Abbey at Cluny

This place is looking just as good as it did before.

This is the most important of these pictures, the one I came back to the most because it is the one that projects, in those who can make some claim to possession of its ultra-superior qualities, the most authority and self-assurance, and of course it is that that I have always lusted after with complete and shameless abandon. 

I would definitely still go and see this if I were able. It's got too much lore and connection to classic Europe to be too diminished in my eyes.

Well, maybe.

House of Jacques Coeur, Bourges

The Doges Palace always has had a little bit of a crowd--no one dreams of going to empty cities, even generally misanthropic intellectuals.

Now it's the poster child for overtourism. They are getting very close to implementing a fee to enter the city.

Medici-Riccardi Palace. I had to get something from Florence in here. It's another one of the old standbys of the touristic imagination that sounds like it has become somewhat more difficult at least to partake of the feeling of being somewhere very special and great. Perhaps this is not true. I was there in '97, pre-Euro,and the numbers of visitors, while lamented at the time, were certainly much smaller than now, and I felt that I found a great deal of what I was looking for. 

I'm going to publish this now. I was almost finished on the 23rd but I had a bit of a health incident on Christmas Eve so I don't know if I'm going to be up to polishing this for a few weeks. However I may do a short end of year type post in a couple of days because I am laid up for a few days.