The eighteenth-century route, still walkable
The Grand Tour
For two hundred years a wealthy young northern European was sent south to learn taste, and the itinerary barely changed: Paris, the Alps, the Italian cities, ideally Greece. The route survives, the coaching inns are hotels, and the trains do in hours what took them weeks.
8 places across 4 countries · not an itinerary
Paris
The first stop, then as now, and the one that taught manners rather than antiquity.
Lauterbrunnen
The Alps, which the eighteenth century found terrifying and the nineteenth found sublime.
Milan
Over the pass and into Italy: the first opera house of the journey.
Venice
Carnival, Canaletto, and the paintings they took home as souvenirs.
Florence
The Uffizi, already a public gallery when the tourists arrived.
Rome
The point of the whole thing, and where the drawings were made.
Naples
Vesuvius, Pompeii newly dug, and the furthest most of them got.
Athens
The few who kept going, and came back with the Parthenon in their sketchbooks.
Not an itinerary
A theme is a way of seeing, not a route: these places are not in travelling order and most people take three or four of them, not all. For an order that respects distance, put the ones you want into the Planner.
Countries it crosses
France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece