My private Italy: The Grand Tour, when Europe came to Italy to grow up

On the evening of October 29th, 1786, a tired traveller entered Rome through the Porta del Popolo. His passport listed him as Filippo Miller, a German painter. He had slipped out of Carlsbad at three o’clock one September morning without a word to anyone. He was thirty-seven and one of Europe’s most famous writers. His real name was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and a few weeks later he wrote that he counted the day he entered Rome as his second birthday.

I think of him every time a guest confesses, a little embarrassed, that this is “only” their first trip to Italy. Never apologise for that. You are in excellent company. For more than two centuries the young elite of Europe crossed the Alps for exactly the same reason: they had been told that nobody could call themselves truly educated without having seen Italy. They called it the Grand Tour.

So, let’s pack a trunk, hire a tutor and set off.

Three years, one tutor and a bottomless purse

The Grand Tour, then, was a journey of two to five years through Europe, with Italy as its final prize, made mostly by young British aristocrats between the late 17th and the early 19th century. The expression was made popular by Richard Lassels, an English priest and travelling tutor. In his guidebook The Voyage of Italy (1670) he argued that no one could truly understand Livy and Caesar without having made the “grand tour” of France and Italy. In the 18th century, the journey became an almost compulsory rite of passage for the sons of the British aristocracy, soon imitated by young people from all over Europe.

The typical traveller was a young man of about twenty, fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, who left for two, three, sometimes five years, with servants, a mountain of luggage, letters of credit for the bankers and letters of introduction for the courts. And, above all, with a tutor, whom everyone called the bear-leader. Like the men who led dancing bears from fair to fair, his job was to keep a young, rich and energetic creature on a leash. He did not always succeed.

Officially, the young lord travelled to study the classics, admire the art, polish his languages and learn the manners of foreign courts. Unofficially, there were also the gaming tables, the opera singers and the Venetian Carnival.

Over the Alps in a chair

After a few months in Paris, the real adventure began: the Alps. The most popular crossing was the Mont Cenis pass, between Savoy and Piedmont, and until Napoleon built a proper road at the beginning of the 19th century, no carriage could go over it. The carriages were taken apart and loaded onto mules, while the travellers were carried up in wicker chairs by local porters and, in winter, slid down the other side on sledges.

On the other side, Italy welcomed them with Turin, the elegant capital of the House of Savoy, then Milan, Genoa, Parma, and finally the true goals of the journey.

Venice for pleasure, Florence for taste

Venice was the city of pleasure. Masks could be worn for a good part of the year, and behind a bauta, the white mask with its black cloak and tricorn hat, nobody could tell a duke from a gondolier. Fortunes changed hands every night at the Ridotto, the state gambling house, until the Republic closed it in 1774.

Canaletto worked largely for English clients, through the British consul Joseph Smith. His views of the Grand Canal were, quite literally, the postcards of the Grand Tour, and when George III bought Smith’s collection in 1762, some of the finest Canalettos in the world ended up in the British Royal Collection.

Florence was the city of taste. Every English traveller was received by Sir Horace Mann, the British envoy, and made a pilgrimage to the Tribuna of the Uffizi, where the star was the Medici Venus, then considered the most beautiful statue in the world. Johann Zoffany painted the room in the 1770s, crowded with English gentlemen gazing at the goddess with an enthusiasm that does not look entirely artistic.

Rome, where every Grand Tourist had his portrait painted

But all roads, as you know, lead to Rome. The English settled around Piazza di Spagna, in such numbers that the Romans called the area the English ghetto, and they met at the Caffè Greco in Via dei Condotti, open since 1760. The Roman Forum was then a half-buried field called Campo Vaccino, the cow field, because cattle grazed peacefully among the columns of the temples.

Rome was also the great marketplace of the Grand Tour. Dealers sold ancient statues, often generously “restored” and occasionally brand new. And hardly a young lord left without his portrait by Pompeo Batoni, who painted more than two hundred British travellers, each posed elegantly beside a classical statue or with the Colosseum in the background, as if to say: I was there.

Naples, the volcano and the buried cities

The most adventurous went further south, to Naples, then one of the largest cities in Europe. Vesuvius was particularly restless in the 18th century, and climbing it at night to watch the lava became the most thrilling moment of the whole journey. The British envoy Sir William Hamilton, who lived in Naples for more than thirty years, climbed it dozens of times and became one of the fathers of volcanology.

At the foot of the mountain something even more extraordinary was happening. In 1738 the Bourbon king Charles began excavating Herculaneum, and ten years later Pompeii. For the first time, Europeans could walk into a Roman town frozen on the day of the eruption of 79 AD. The Grand Tourists were, in a sense, the first archaeological tourists in history.

Goethe, the traveller who came to be reborn

Which brings us back to our German painter. Goethe had grown up with Italy on the walls: his father, Johann Caspar, had made his own Italian journey in 1740 and hung engravings of Rome in the family house in Frankfurt. The son had been dreaming of those images since childhood.

His own journey, told in the Italian Journey (Italienische Reise) that he published thirty years later, is perhaps the most famous travel book ever written about this country. In Malcesine, on Lake Garda, he sat down to sketch the old castle and a suspicious crowd immediately gathered around him: the town stood on the border between the Venetian Republic and Austria, and a foreigner drawing fortifications could only be a spy. Goethe talked his way out of trouble with charm and the help of a local man who had lived in Frankfurt, and today the castle proudly dedicates a room to him. In Vicenza he fell head over heels for Palladio. In Rome he took rooms in Via del Corso with his friend, the painter Tischbein, who portrayed him reclining on ancient ruins in a white travelling cloak and a wide-brimmed hat. Goethe in the Roman Campagna, now in Frankfurt, is the most famous image of a Grand Tourist ever painted, and the apartment they shared is today the Casa di Goethe, a small museum that still breathes the happiness of a man finally free.

In Naples he climbed Vesuvius three times. Then he went where few Grand Tourists dared: Sicily, in the spring of 1787. And there he wrote the line I quote to my guests more often than any other: “Italy without Sicily leaves no image in the soul: here is the key to everything.”He returned to Rome and stayed until April 1788, and leaving broke his heart; on his last nights he wandered through the city by moonlight, as if saying goodbye to a person. He poured his longing into the song of Mignon, which opens by asking whether you know the land where the lemon trees bloom: Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn? For generations of Germans, that single line simply meant Italy.

Downton Abbey, a room with a view and a Vespa

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars brought the classic Grand Tour to an end, and in the 19th century the railways and the first organised trips of Thomas Cook turned it into something new: tourism. But the old route never disappeared: Byron, Shelley and Keats still came, and Stendhal almost fainted with emotion in Santa Croce.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Italy had become the place where the British upper classes went to mend almost anything: weak lungs, broken hearts and, occasionally, damaged reputations. Fans of Downton Abbey will remember the Dowager Countess, worried about Lady Mary’s prospects after a scandal, suggesting the family take her abroad, where you can usually find an Italian “who’s not too picky”. It is a joke, delivered with Maggie Smith’s perfect timing, but it says a great deal. Whole English colonies spent the winter on the Riviera, in Sanremo and Bordighera, where they built Anglican churches, tennis clubs and tea rooms among the palm trees.

Florence had the most famous colony of all. The English and Americans bought villas on the hills of Fiesole and Bellosguardo, and in 1908 E. M. Forster opened A Room with a View with Lucy Honeychurch furious at her Florentine pension, promised a view of the Arno and given a courtyard. Some of these residents never left, not even when war came: the elderly English ladies the Florentines nicknamed the Scorpioni, whom Franco Zeffirelli, who grew up among them, brought to the screen in Tea with Mussolini.

After the Second World War the dream changed colour. In 1953 Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck rode a Vespa through the streets of Rome in Roman Holiday, and suddenly half the world wanted to do the same. In 1960 Fellini’s La Dolce Vita sent Anita Ekberg into the Trevi Fountain and gave the world a new word, paparazzo, from the name of the photographer in the film. Rome became “Hollywood on the Tiber”, Capri, Portofino and the Amalfi Coast filled with the jet set, and in 1962 Jacqueline Kennedy spent her summer holiday in Ravello.

A journey that never really ended

When I design an itinerary today, I often realise that the Grand Tourists drew it before me: Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples and, for the bravest, Sicily. My guests travel lighter, without bear-leaders, and in two weeks rather than three years. But what they come looking for is genuinely the same.

The trunks have become suitcases and the letters of credit a card in your pocket, but the question the young lords asked themselves at the foot of the Alps has not changed at all: who will I be when I come home?

Ciao da Marcello

My Private Italy: Three Places in Florence for the travellers who think they’ve seen it all