People and tourists
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 1, 2026
The word tourist first appeared in Italian in 1837 (tourism only in 1907). The etymology is clear: the tour (the grand tour) is the educational travel that European aristocrats and intellectuals took starting from the 18th century, especially in Italy, to learn about its art history, ways of life and culture. As often happens, what was initially exclusive to an elite, has over time turned into a mass phenomenon.
It is significant that its antecedent is certainly the pilgrimages that believers took to visit the sacred sites of their religion: tourists, like pilgrims, are peregrini, i.e., according to the Latin meaning of the term, strangers on earth. Tourism is the sign of an epochal shift in the relation between people and the land they inhabit: wherever they are, they are extranei, foreigners (extra), especially in the very city where they live. I perfectly remember the astonishment with which, many years ago already, when I lived in Venice, I realised it was no longer possible to distinguish Venetians from tourists.
But it’s not just the relationship of citizens with their city that has changed; the city itself has changed altogether: people have become tourists, i.e. foreigners, to the same extent that the land they inhabit (or rather, they once inhaibited) is now extranea and peregrina. If one reads, as I have recently, Joseph Roth’s extraordinary description of Marseille in the autumn of 1925, with its dense, adventurous alleys, where all ages of history were crowded, lively, in an area of just a few kilometers and no one was a stranger, it’s difficult to escape the bitter, implacable observation that cities no longer exist today: tourism was able to destroy them, because they already ceased to be alive. Overtourism doesn’t come from outside; it began within us, within familiar districts and neighbourhoods, which we are no longer capable of inhabiting. 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 place, then inhabitation is the primordial form of ethics. Having become tourists, having lost the ability to inhabit, being peregrini and strangers everywhere, then compels us to imagine from scratch a possible ethics, to reinvent the ability to inhabit from top to bottom. It is certainly not an easy task, but it perhaps offers us the only way out of tourism, to make our land and our cities habitable again.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, July 1, 2026
The word tourist first appeared in Italian in 1837 (tourism only in 1907). The etymology is clear: the tour (the grand tour) is the educational travel that European aristocrats and intellectuals took starting from the 18th century, especially in Italy, to learn about its art history, ways of life and culture. As often happens, what was initially exclusive to an elite, has over time turned into a mass phenomenon.
It is significant that its antecedent is certainly the pilgrimages that believers took to visit the sacred sites of their religion: tourists, like pilgrims, are peregrini, i.e., according to the Latin meaning of the term, strangers on earth. Tourism is the sign of an epochal shift in the relation between people and the land they inhabit: wherever they are, they are extranei, foreigners (extra), especially in the very city where they live. I perfectly remember the astonishment with which, many years ago already, when I lived in Venice, I realised it was no longer possible to distinguish Venetians from tourists.
But it’s not just the relationship of citizens with their city that has changed; the city itself has changed altogether: people have become tourists, i.e. foreigners, to the same extent that the land they inhabit (or rather, they once inhaibited) is now extranea and peregrina. If one reads, as I have recently, Joseph Roth’s extraordinary description of Marseille in the autumn of 1925, with its dense, adventurous alleys, where all ages of history were crowded, lively, in an area of just a few kilometers and no one was a stranger, it’s difficult to escape the bitter, implacable observation that cities no longer exist today: tourism was able to destroy them, because they already ceased to be alive. Overtourism doesn’t come from outside; it began within us, within familiar districts and neighbourhoods, which we are no longer capable of inhabiting. 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 place, then inhabitation is the primordial form of ethics. Having become tourists, having lost the ability to inhabit, being peregrini and strangers everywhere, then compels us to imagine from scratch a possible ethics, to reinvent the ability to inhabit from top to bottom. It is certainly not an easy task, but it perhaps offers us the only way out of tourism, to make our land and our cities habitable again.
(English translation by I, Robot)
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