Travel is always to some degree disappointing because we romanticize our destination without having experienced it in reality.  Before we depart for Venice, for example, our conception of the floating city comes from picture-perfect postcards and things we’ve seen in movies.  We imagine our trip will consist of quaint cobblestone streets and hand-crafted cappuccinos at Cafe Florian, the world’s oldest cafe.  As we indulge in the Caffè Anniversario 300, a decadent, distinctly Italian blend of espresso, amaretto, hazelnut, and chocolate, we imagine we’ll gaze upon the gothic beauty of St. Mark’s Basilica and nibble on salmon and spinach quiche.  With a bubbly glass of Prosecco in hand later that evening, we’ll feel like Venetian royalty.

Sadly, our image of Venice differs drastically from its reality.  Though the floating city does shimmer on the magical blue green waters of the Adriatic Sea, our glamorized conception of Venice neglected the tacky tourist traps, the suffocating sun and the notoriously crowded streets of Italy.  In postcards, cobblestone streets were a charming artifact of the old world— in reality, they make it maddeningly difficult to maneuver our luggage and walk in heels.  And though Cafe Florian does, indeed, take our breath away with its splendid baroque art and adorable pastries, it also costs 80 euros for a single coffee and a few tea cakes.

Sight-seeing especially underscores the difference between reality and fantasy.  In real life, the Colosseum and the Louvre aren’t nearly as impressive or interesting.  Indeed, the world’s great landmarks are often dreadfully boring.  Though the Colosseum once hosted epic gladiatorial battles for thousands of spectators, today it’s a mecca for overweight tourists in Hawaiian shirts and flip flop slippers.  And though the Mona Lisa is perhaps the world’s most famous painting, in real life, it’s a rather unremarkable woman sitting simply— nothing more.

No one examines the disappointments of travel with more charming British cynicism than philosopher Alain de Botton.  In his indispensable volume The Art of Travel, which explained why we travel and how traveling to new places can inspire new thoughts, de Botton shares his own disenchanting experiences abroad.  After being invited to Madrid for a conference, he decides to extend his trip a few days to go sightseeing.  But on Saturday morning, he wakes up in his hotel and doesn’t want to get out of bed despite Madrid’s grand cathedrals and breathtaking monuments.  His guidebooks glare at him from his bedside table as if to chastise him for his laziness.  How— they seem to gasp— can he pass up Plaza Mayor for a king size mattress?

Eventually, de Botton wills himself of bed to explore the city.  As he sits under the Spanish sun in Plaza Provincia, his guidebook instructs him in the bland facts of his surroundings: “The Neo-classical facade of the Iglesia de San Francisco El Grande is by Sabatini but the building itself, a circular edifice with six radial chapels and a large dome 33m/108 ft wide, is by Francisco Cabezas.”  Much like a history teacher who recites the important figures and monumental dates of WWII without weaving those facts into a compelling story, most guidebooks fail to fan the flames of our curiosity.  De Botton’s travel guide offers an abundance of information but is as intriguing as a dictionary.  After all, who cares about Iglesia de San Francisco El Grande’s precise mathematical measurements?  As de Botton confesses candidly, “Unfortunately for the traveler, most objects don’t come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve.  There is usually nothing affixed to them at all, or if there is it tends to be the wrong thing.  There was a lot fixed to the Iglesia de San Francisco El Grande, which stood at the end of the long traffic-choked Carrera de San Francisco—  but it hardly helped me be curious about it.”

Ironically, travel is often one thing: boring.  Despite the novelty of medieval architecture and cobblestone streets, a foreign land can be just as uninteresting as our own city.  Travel guides and museum placards are partially to blame.  Rather than capture the horror and chaos of Picasso’s “Guernica,” a placard at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art will merely mention its history (painted in response to the bombing of Guernica by Nazi Germany), its date of creation (1937), and its technique (oil on canvas).  Such dry facts are about as relevant to our real lives as the slope-intercept formula y= mx +b.

De Botton soon realizes that if he wants his trip to be more than a yawns-worthy visit to a museum, he has to find a way to make sight-seeing— to borrow Friedrich Nietzsche’s term— “life enhancing.”  No matter how passionately a travel guide might argue for the significance of a Picasso painting, it will mean little to us unless we give it meaning.  Instead of simply accept expert opinion and agree that “Guernica” is one of the most moving anti-war paintings, we should ask ourselves how it can be meaningful to us personally.  What can it teach us about how to live?  How can it illuminate some aspect of the human experience?  We must ask thoughtful questions and be active rather than passive.  As de Botton writes, “For the person standing before the Iglesia de San Francisco El Grande, a question might be, ‘Why have people felt the need to build churches?’ or even, ‘Why do we worship God?'”  From there, a tourist might wonder why there are different churches in different places or why humans invented religion at all.

Lesson?  For the small seed of curiosity to sprout, we must nurture it.  Or as de Botton would say, the Neo-classical facade of a Spanish church or a mid-century Cubist painting can only be interesting if we’re interested.