The word tourist first appeared in Italian in 1837 (tourism only in 1907). The etymology is clear: the tour (the Grand Tour) was the educational journey undertaken by European aristocrats and intellectuals from the 18th century onward, especially in Italy, to learn about its art history, way of life, and culture. As is often the case, what was initially the domain of an elite has, over time, transformed into a mass phenomenon.
It is significant that its antecedent is certainly the pilgrimages that believers undertook to visit the sacred sites of their religion: tourists, like pilgrims, are also peregrini, that is, according to the meaning of the Latin term, strangers on earth. Tourism is the sign of an epochal shift in the relationship between people and the land they inhabit: wherever they are, they are strangers, outsiders (extra), above all in the very city where they live. I vividly recall the astonishment I felt, many years ago, when I lived in Venice, upon realising that it was no longer possible to distinguish Venetians from tourists.
However, it is not only the bond between citizens and their city that has changed: the city itself has also been transformed. People have become tourists, that is, strangers, to the same extent that the land they inhabit (or rather, once inhabited) is now foreign and a land of pilgrimage. If one reads, as I have recently, Joseph Roth’s extraordinary description of Marseille in the autumn of 1925, with its dense, adventurous alleyways, where within a few square kilometers all eras of history thronged alive and no one was a stranger, it is difficult to escape the bitter, implacable realisation that cities today no longer exist: tourism has been able to destroy them because they had already ceased to be alive. Overtourism doesn’t come from outside; it began within us, within the neighborhoods and familiar communities we are no longer able to inhabit. To inhabit is an intensive form of the verb “to have” (habeo) and signifies a certain way of dwelling and living, of having habits and customs. And if ethos in Greek designates the habitual dwelling, then dwelling is the primordial form of ethics. Having become tourists, having lost the capacity to inhabit, being everywhere pilgrims and strangers, compels us to reimagine a possible ethics, to reinvent from top to bottom the capacity to inhabit. Certainly not an easy task, but one that perhaps offers us the only way out of tourism, to make our land and our cities habitable again.
Giorgio Agamben: Men and women, and tourists
The word tourist first appeared in Italian in 1837 (tourism only in 1907). The etymology is clear: the tour (the Grand Tour) was the educational journey undertaken by European aristocrats and intellectuals from the 18th century onward, especially in Italy, to learn about its art history, way of life, and culture. As is often the case, what was initially the domain of an elite has, over time, transformed into a mass phenomenon.
It is significant that its antecedent is certainly the pilgrimages that believers undertook to visit the sacred sites of their religion: tourists, like pilgrims, are also peregrini, that is, according to the meaning of the Latin term, strangers on earth. Tourism is the sign of an epochal shift in the relationship between people and the land they inhabit: wherever they are, they are strangers, outsiders (extra), above all in the very city where they live. I vividly recall the astonishment I felt, many years ago, when I lived in Venice, upon realising that it was no longer possible to distinguish Venetians from tourists.
However, it is not only the bond between citizens and their city that has changed: the city itself has also been transformed. People have become tourists, that is, strangers, to the same extent that the land they inhabit (or rather, once inhabited) is now foreign and a land of pilgrimage. If one reads, as I have recently, Joseph Roth’s extraordinary description of Marseille in the autumn of 1925, with its dense, adventurous alleyways, where within a few square kilometers all eras of history thronged alive and no one was a stranger, it is difficult to escape the bitter, implacable realisation that cities today no longer exist: tourism has been able to destroy them because they had already ceased to be alive. Overtourism doesn’t come from outside; it began within us, within the neighborhoods and familiar communities we are no longer able to inhabit. To inhabit is an intensive form of the verb “to have” (habeo) and signifies a certain way of dwelling and living, of having habits and customs. And if ethos in Greek designates the habitual dwelling, then dwelling is the primordial form of ethics. Having become tourists, having lost the capacity to inhabit, being everywhere pilgrims and strangers, compels us to reimagine a possible ethics, to reinvent from top to bottom the capacity to inhabit. Certainly not an easy task, but one that perhaps offers us the only way out of tourism, to make our land and our cities habitable again.
Quodlibet, July 1, 2026