Blame the Victorians for feeding our hunger for travel. However, it’s a hunger that is best satiated with a familiar menu, says Rachel Baldacchino.

No easy feat the travelling life. Not when buying a flight to Rome comes with a hostile, guilt inflicting, carbon damage calculator and the not so happy knowledge that with your cocktails on Campo de’ Fiori you’ve also bagged, picture this says the detector, 120 kilos of CO2 or three weeks of non-stop television.

We’re hardly the generation to blame for the commodification of place and the ensuing ecological footprint, though we have taken both to heightened extremes. Yet let’s go back a bit. Tourism boomed in the 19th century and we’ve got the Victorians to blame for the situation we’re in today. Luckily not all were busy gorging on queasy travel texts selling destinations with ‘authenticity’ and hopping about the earth. The desperately laughing few came in celebrity packs with big names like Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Walter Pater and Henry James. So what of their travel philosophy and what can we make of it today?

Their published experiences of place took mass tourism by the horns and gave it a serious flogging. So serious that we still feel the blows today. Discursive ramblings in the form of Dickens’ Pictures from Italy or James’ Italian Hours cluttered with impressions and deliria and nothing remotely resembling the do’s and don’ts of the traditional travel piece could have easily been promoting an aimless hour of flânerie around the familiar streets of London as those of Venice or Rome.

These non-chronological literary reconstructions of undertaken journeys are less concerned with the specifics of place and more with the endless possibilities of rethinking one’s relationship with a chosen environment. Herein lies their kind message to our ailing planet. Rediscovering the allures of the familiar can be an interesting source of respite. Plane abstinence need not mean you’re dull.

Do more with less they’re saying. A profound and gratifying experience of place seems at times much more plausible upon brief and rapid encounters such as one embarks on when travelling as a tourist. In Genius Loci: Notes on Places, a lesser known Victorian Vernon Lee writes about the ease with which our memory holds on to brief encounters with a place.

When it comes to “amours de voyage” she writes, remembrance may be long even though “the actual moment of meeting is necessarily very brief”. When gaze is fresh, space unfamiliar and time a luxury, our sense of the beautiful flourishes. Then we easily sift through visible embodiments of new spaces, holding on to a few and forever locating especially there our sense of knowing and feeling for a particular place.

This is where the fun stops with Lee, who was born in 1856 in Boulogne-Sur-Mer to British parents and died in Florence on February 13, 1935.

In the same collection she lets us kindly know that manipulating happiness in the form of travel, forcing it to come through in pots of newfound luck for later fetching from the repositories of memory doesn’t always materialise. This for the simple reason that commercial transactions don’t buy lasting sensations. They buy other things and nice ones too, but not those.

The spirit of place is best captured in the familiar says Lee. Those few miles from home harbour the possibility of newness for just as the stability of long friendships brings constant depth and perspective to an otherwise same you and your story, so can the substance of our heart and mind refresh the mundane. Just as “there are, or at least may be, some human relationships which constitute the bulk of life, and yet remain its poetry, so there are one or two places for every individual, where he may live habitually, yet never lose the sense of delight, wonder, and gratitude ... Thus we enrich our life, not by the making of far-fetched plans, nor by the seeking of change and gain; but by the faithful putting to profit of what is within our grasp.”

Vernon Lee’s neighbourhood: the Fiesole hills of Florence.

Easy for Lee to speak when her quotidian were the Tuscan valleys and stony hillsides, her home right below the Fiesole hills of Florence. Compared with the Alps she writes that the Tuscan Apennines seem scarcely worth talking of. “Their peaks are not very high, their valleys are narrowed into gorges by the washing and slipping of earth, and they show too little rock and too much vegetable soil.”

Yet for all their manifest inferiority the spaces that inhabit one’s ordinary life, daily and hourly hold the same “delightful qualities of high places, the solitude and silence and newness, the eternal drama”. This could be post-Romantic nonsense with an ounce of truth. The underlying notion that we carry within us the ability to free play between imagination and reason, pushing the boundaries of the ordinary into the extraordinary every day and for free is compelling.

The electrifying rhythms, the digital landscapes, the vast influx of images we let loose in our lives on a daily base by choice or sheer indifference come constantly between us and our sensory equipment. We feel, touch, smell, taste, and see better when we get away. Yet as Lee writes, “How much of one’s past sensations, hopes, wishes, words, has got entangled in the little familiar sprigs, grasses and moss.” The lie of the familiar land is home to sensations capable of newness by simple way of slow repetition. Rereading the Victorians works more or less in the same way.