To be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the “modem” experience. Not to “go away” is like not possessing a car or a nice house. It is a marker of status in modem societies and is also thought to be necessary to health. 47_____ In Imperial Rome, for example, a fairly extensive pattern of travel for pleasure and culture existed for the elite. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, pilgrimages had become a widespread phenomenon practicable and systematized, served by a growing industry of networks of charitable hospices and mass-produced indulgence handbooks. Such pilgrimages often included a mixture of religious devotion and culture and pleasure. The Grand Tour had become firmly established by the end of the seventeenth century for the sons of the aristocracy and the gentry, and by the late eighteenth century for the sons of the professional middle class. 48_____ There was a visualization of the travel experience, or the development of the gaze, aided and assisted by the growth of guidebooks which promoted new ways of seeing. The eighteenth century had also seen the development of a considerable tourist infrastructure in the form of spa towns throughout much of Europe. The whole apparatus of spa life was designed to provide a concentrated urban experience of frenetic socializing for a dispersed rural elite. 49_____ In the countryside work and play were particularly intertwined in the case of fairs. People would often travel considerable distances and the fairs always involved a mixture of business and pleasure normally centered around the tavern. But before the nineteenth century few people outside the upper classes traveled anywhere to see objects for reasons unconnected with work or business. 50_____ Travel is now thought to occupy 40 percent of available “free time.” It is a crucial element of modern life to feel that travel and holidays are necessary.