The Dispatch
by Nic Rowan
“When thinking about travel, I have always found [Nancy] Mitford’s distinction between the tourist and the visitor useful. ‘The tourist tours, he seldom spends a week in the same place,’ she writes. ‘The visitor stops in a town and leads the life of its inhabitants.’ In Mitford’s case, ‘visiting’ meant parking in Venice for a season and living simply in a small apartment. Under these conditions, she was able to focus on her writing and produce those wonderfully catty French court histories that remain among the most entertaining books of the genre. To say that she was leading the life of the city’s inhabitants is perhaps a bit precious — but she certainly seems to have gotten more out of Venice than the tourists gawking at Saint Mark’s Basilica or crowding into the garishly painted gondolas. I try to stay on the visitor side of Mitford’s distinction whenever I go somewhere new.” (05/08/26)