I was reading about Sparta the other day and while reading, saw that by the Roman times, the Spartans were reputedly a tourist attraction for the Romans. This brings me to the question, how did tourism work in the ancient world? Wouldn’t it be dangerous for people to leave their homes in large, crime ridden cities for extended periods of time?
Much like in modern times, people left their homes to be supervised by members of their family, their servants (or slaves), relatives, neighbours and friends. About travelling in general: there is a very good (and free!) article online by Robert L. Cioffi, "Travel in the Roman World", 2016.
Abstract: "This article examines Roman travel. It seeks to show how deeply travel was woven into the fabric of the ancient world and how many aspects of the Roman experience relate to it. Rather than pretend to total coverage, this article, which is divided into four sections, offers some ways of thinking about travel and its place in the Roman world, exploring the practice, ideology, and imagination of travel. Moving from a top-down perspective on Roman infrastructure and the role of travel in the practice of Roman power, the article turns to a bottom-up view of the experiences of individuals when traveling, concluding with a survey of the imaginative representation of travel in the literature of the Roman world."
This chapter for example talks about tourism, especially about pilgrimages which were very popular:
"“I Was Here”: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Individual Travel
While rituals of arrival and departure make an immobile community fellow participants in official movements, members of those communities also experienced travel themselves. Travel looks rather different from the perspective of individuals, such as the pair of Roman citizens, in all likelihood soldiers, who left one of the few Latin inscriptions in Philae on the South Pylon of the Temple of Isis:
I, Lucius Trebonius Oricula, was here. I, Gaius Numonius Vala, was here in the thirteenth consulship of the emperor Caesar, eight days before the Calends of April.
Lucius’s and Gaius’s rather superficial engagement with Philae stands in contrast to the deep religious significance that the site held for the numerous pilgrims who left dedications at the temple of Isis in Greek and demotic Egyptian. The contrast between these religious pilgrims and Lucius and Gaius, unlikely forbearers of the genre of narcissistic travel graffiti, raises important questions about the nature of two closely linked categories of travel, tourism and pilgrimage, which can be difficult to distinguish from one another in an ancient context."