Modern tourism is born of the Grand Tour. From the 17th century onwards, the brahmins of Britain travelled across the Continent for the twin purposes of education and entertainment. The Tour, an itinerant masterclass in antique culture and contemporary manners, gained popularity throughout the subsequent centuries. The concept of leisure travel spread to other national elites, and to the middle classes. Eventually, with the onset of mass transport and paid holidays, it came within reach of the working classes. 

Italy, with its rich mix of treasures from classical antiquity, culinary delights, and friendly climes, was the obvious first target of the Grand Tour. Another early tourist hotspot was Germany's Rhine Valley. Not only because of its natural splendour and architectural heritage, but also because of its very topography. In the days before rail, the river was a natural conduit for the leisure traveller, much as it had been for the traders, artists and builders who had unwittingly created the attractions along the banks. 

'Tourism' - a word first appearing in print in 1822 - quickly turned professional, attested by the rapid spread during the 19th century of Hotel Bristol as a generic name for overnight accommodation for the weary tourist [1]. Tourism also produced a new type of cartography - the tourist map. These were explicitly designed to be alluring, to include and reflect the leisurely enjoyment of travel.

This map is a late example of an early type of tourist map, the so-called Rheinpanorama. It depicts, in overlapping sections, and embellished with postcard-like images of riverside attractions, the most popular stretch of what came to be known as the Romantic Rhine, from Bonn to Mainz.

The lovingly detailed and beautifully illustrated foldout sections of this Rheinpanorama were bound in book-form and published in 1909. By then, this particular genre was almost a century old. The first Rheinpanorama was published in 1811 by Elisabeth von Adlerflycht, who used continuous parallel projection to lend a bird's-eye perspective to the course of the Rhine. The map proved a hit with the leisure traveller of the day, and really took off when steam ships started plying their trade on the Rhine about a decade later. 

Its elongated sections are reminiscent of the perpendicular perspective of a few historical antecedents, such as the Tabula Peutingeriana, a Roman road map;  and John Ogilby's scroll maps, vertically detailing itineraries to and from London (see #405). A later example of this kind of riverine cartography are Harold Fisk's alluvial maps of the Mississippi Valley (see #208).

As an unfolding tapestry of the Rhenish landscape, the Rheinpanorama maps are a visual delight. They are at once a lure towards, a guide to, and a souvenir of a river steeped in history, and shrouded in legend. They can be 'read' in either an upstream or a downstream direction. This first section starts at Cologne, nearest the river's outlet into the North Sea at Rotterdam.

 

 

But for the giant twin spires of its famous Dom, Cologne looks tiny on the map-crowning panorama. On the bird’s-eye section below, Germany’s western metropolis looks positively rustic. Yet records show that the city’s population broke the half-million mark around 1910, right about when this map was published. Depicting Cologne as a tiny town must have fitted with the general conceit of the map: to present the Rhine valley as a semi-rural idyll.