The role played by tourism in the discovery or rediscovery of Europe’s past is quite worthy of mention. This interest in the past is not new, but it has never occured on such a scale before, and it certainly was not an organized industry. One may say that it originated in the Renaissance, when Petrarch visited Rome to see the ancient city’s ruins, a visit which would trigger in him a sort of Italian nationalism through a nostalgy for the glorious past. For a few decades, tourism has increased more and more, resulting in the sometimes complete transformation of touristic places, be they villages, castles, churches, and others. The attractive aspects taken on by many old towns and villages is a product of this craze for the past; more than that, certain features, which were previously abandonned and, as late as the 1960s, would have been destroyed or sold by the communal authorities, were saved precisely for the sake of tourism. Since then, all the historical patrimony of the European countries is under the legislation of various governmental agencies and ministers for culture and tourism. Culture and history seem to be everywhere and thriving.

Yet, what Petrarch beheld were the ruins of an extinct glory, not the living heart of an Empire that civilized the world; and however perfected the Latin of the Renaissance authors may have been, it could not have developped further as the language of Cicero did, because this language was by then already extinct, replaced by myriad of daughter languages: it is for their works in Italian, not Latin, that Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio are most famous today. So today, even though our eyes may be turned toward the past, the direction of our look beholds not the living culture of our forefathers, but the ruins of their achievement. When we look at a black and white photograph, and we perceive the the depth that separates us from our ancestors, we feel that the world in which they lived is no more, and can no longer be. This is why we treasure the objects of our past: they remind us of a by-gone (to our eyes) age. This is why, too, sciences and occupations such as history, archaeology, cultural management, and tourism thrive: they are a why to regain what we feel we have lost.