The Grand Tour was the traditional travel of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of mass railroad transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term was coined by Richard Lassels (c 1603-1668), an expatriate Roman Catholic priest who wrote The Voyage of Italy, which was published posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London. Lassels' introduction listed four areas in which travel furnished "an accomplished, consummate Traveller": The intellectual, the social, the ethical (by the opportunity of drawing moral instruction from all the traveller saw), and the political.

The Grand Tour served as an education rite of passage by those who took the Tour. Primarily associated with Britain (particularly the British nobility and wealthy gentry), similar trips were made by wealthy young men of Protestant Northern European nations on the Continent. (In general, the French looked to the salons of Paris and Versailles instead, to provide a cultured polish to its gilded youth and reinforce standards of taste.) The New York Times described the Grand Tour in this way: "Three hundred years ago, wealthy young Englishmen began taking a post-Oxbridge trek through France and Italy in search of art, culture and the roots of Western civilization. With nearly unlimited funds, aristocratic connections and months (or years) to roam, they commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled with the upper crust of the Continent."

The primary value of the Grand Tour lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionable society of the European continent. A grand tour could last from several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a knowledgeable guide or tutor. The Grand Tour had more than superficial cultural importance; as E.P. Thompson stated, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power."

Published accounts

Published (and often polished) accounts of personal experiences on the Grand Tour provide illuminating detail and a first-hand perspective of the Great Tour. Of some accounts offered in their own lifetimes, Jeremy Black detects the element of literary artifice in these and cautions that they should be approached as travel literature rather than unvarnished accounts; he instances Joseph Addison, John Andrews, William Thomas Beckford, William Coxe, Elizabeth Craven, John Moore, tutor to successive dukes of Hamilton, Samuel Jackson Pratt, Tobias Smollett, Philip Thicknesse, and Arthur Young.