The Grand Tour

The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in the grand style. Some Grand Tourists, among them Lord Byron, got as far as Greece; but Italy was coveted as the glittering birthplace of the Renaissance — a haven of art on the Arno. In some ways, then, Britain became civilised through its contact with Italy. ‘A man who has not been to Italy,’ Samuel Johnson observed in 1776 (perhaps ironically), ‘is always conscious of an inferiority.’

The grand habit of touring the Continent for its art and classical antiquity flourished from the mid-17th century until the advent of rail transport in the 1840s. Though trains were often of a biblical slowness and unreliability (not least in Italy), they spelled the end of solitary aristocratic travel. The Grand Tour was overwhelmingly the preserve of nobility and landed gentry. Accompanied by a Cicerone (scholarly guide), young men embarked on their educational rite of passage through the gracious suavities of Paris and on south across the Alps to Italy, where the liquid softness of the Mediterranean worked on them like a soporific.