The Ethics of Exploration
On what it really means to explore ethically, and why the hardest place to start is ourselves
“I just feel at home here, it’s amazing. My grandmother was famous for her chicken parm recipe, we’re Italian you know,” boasted Phil… Fred? Frank. Definitely probably Frank. The rest of the group nodded in friendly acceptance.
A bead of sweat crept slowly down my forehead, but it didn’t distract me from reciting the difference between ice cream and gelato, with a smile, as I had 62,349 times that Roman summer. Overtourism meant two full food tour groups a day, guaranteed. And each one concluded with the shameful admission that they, too, had fallen prey to big chain gelato. They vowed to explore Italy ethically henceforth and I forced a smile at their kind intention. Perhaps I was saving local businesses, one scoop at a time. It was something both I and my clients could feel good about.
Lots of people choose to explore the world in hopes of an illuminating experience that leads to self-discovery. Italy, my home of the past twenty years, welcomes many such pilgrims. Some are tourists, some are heritage seekers, and some are more permanent transplants. Years of working as a tour guide and a teacher have led me to the conclusion that people generally do the best they can with the tools they have. We all want to be good guests. What Frank, and most people for that matter, didn’t realize was that, while buying a sweet treat at a family run business and perhaps venturing beyond the ransacked capitals of Italy were steps in the right direction, the “ethical exploration” they spoke of has less to do with overtourism than the underexamination of what we expect to find, and who we expect to be.
See, I didn’t tell Fletcher at the time, but chicken parm is not a native dish to Italy. In the past, I had gently suggested that Nonna had simply invented Italian-American cuisine, cool right? Wrong. This nearly always ended uncomfortably, either with an aggressive refusal to hear of it, or silence, and I don’t know which one was worse. I always felt as though I had, at best, ruined their vacation, and at worst, given them an existential crisis. When reality contradicted expectation, to my surprise, the expectation was defended. Exploration gave way to selective openness, a willingness to entertain difference only if it remained palatable. Authenticity is welcomed only if the fantasy is performed back.
On social media, “authenticity” within the travel niche has become a buzzword, but once the phones power down, we accept only the kind that flatters us. The immersion we thought would resolve the language barrier sounds great, but only if we can remain comfortably ourselves. We travel to be transformed, but not unsettled. And when a place refuses to act out the imagined version we’ve rehearsed, we label it disappointing and overrated.
The irony is that the more tightly we cling to our dream world, the more we help reshape the real place around it away from the authenticity we claim to seek. Businesses learn to bend towards our vision in order to survive. Those that don’t, vanish. Restaurants open earlier and include items on the menu not previously considered. Traditions are cartoonified. Neighborhoods reorient toward the visitor’s expectations. You might call it good business, and perhaps it is. Rarely do we admit it is also erasure.
“Authenticity is welcomed only if the fantasy is performed back.”
Overtourism is not just a logistical or environmental failure, it is the external consequence of an internal refusal: the refusal to be changed, unsettled, or disappointed. I thought back to Fabian. I used to think my role was to correct misconceptions, to gently educate, to widen perspective and advocate for ethical choices. I still believe that matters. Over time, though, watching tourists unknowingly cling to their imaginary Italy forced me to confront the scary possibility that I was no different. I resisted the notion that this could possibly be true. I lived here, after all, and worked here. I spoke the language. Heck, I could tell you the trash collection schedule. Surely, I was more open and flexible.
Then again, we’re all guilty of adjusting the narrative to suit our ego. Who hasn’t edited a story in real time, cropping out the inconvenient details and retelling the memory in a way that bolsters the self we prefer? The version of myself I preferred was authoritative, seasoned, and fluent in the life I had built. Somewhere along the way, though, the line between gently correcting those pesky misconceptions and quietly lecturing otherwise curious people had blurred. It wasn’t that I believed I knew everything, it was that repetition had begun to feel like mastery. A life my clients regarded as luminous had, through familiarity, grown ordinary, and I had grown ungrateful. And I wasn’t ready to admit that, least of all to myself. Control can look like confidence from the outside. From within, it feels more like distance. This very mentality was what I had been warning amateur visitors against. You stand in the square you’ve already seen a hundred times online, reproduce the image, and still feel outside of it. Expectation turns experience into performance and somewhere between my 62,348th and 62,349th performance, I realized that Frank and I were not so different after all. I was only doing it in reverse.
After so many tours, I could practically lip sync what would come out of his mouth, and yet, I wasn’t listening. I couldn’t even remember the poor man’s name. Any natural curiosity and wonder had tip-toed out the back, somehow, yet keeping these characteristics alive had been one of the goals of moving abroad in the first place. “Frank” may be the tourist, but that doesn’t excuse the rest of us from carrying a quiet, curious, and unguarded posture of exploration, even into the most ordinary corners of our own days. It’s hard to let what is actually there meet us because it requires daily mindfulness and practice. It’s a decision we have to actively make. Ultimately, it’s up to you, the journey continues either way. The difference is whether we meet it resisting or receptive.
Ethical exploration, I began to understand, is not just about how we move through other people’s landscapes. It is about how honestly we move through our own. To explore ethically means releasing the demand that experience exists to fulfill us. It means observing before narrating and allowing disappointment to refine us rather than disqualify what we encounter. It requires admitting that we may not become who we imagined simply because we crossed a border, and it’s not the border’s responsibility anyways.
If I could ask travelers to let Italy be what it is, messy, layered, sometimes inconvenient, could I not ask the same of myself? Of each other? Is chicken parm not still delicious? Moving abroad never promised to change any of us. It only offered space. What I decide to do with that space, to defend myself within it or surrender to it, continues to be the real measure of what I’m willing to explore.
Sarah Bolen is a writer and educator with a passion for curiosity-led learning. After two decades of living abroad, she writes about language, identity, and how we can make the world a better place when we reconnect with the process of learning.
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