A World Made by Travel took many years to complete and has incurred many debts. I thank my colleagues and co-founders of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project, Dan Edelstein, Paula Findlen, and Caroline Winterer. Their conversation and company has deeply informed my thinking about the Grand Tour, as have students from the very early days of the project, in particular, in chronological order: Molly Taylor Polesky, Sarah Murray, Thea DeArmond and Rachel Midura. They spent much of their respective graduate years at Stanford contributing to both data collection and conceptualizing the project. They remain for me essential interlocutors. I also acknowledge the undergraduates who worked on the project in its early years—Eliza Lupone and Maggie Medlin.

Nicole Coleman, Academic Technology Specialist at the Stanford Humanities Center and research director of the Humanities+Design Lab at the newly-founded Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), kept our research agenda on track and fostered the project with her unique and powerful visionary acumen. She led the union of technology and scholarship that created Palladio and our first publications, and fostered collaborations with Elijah Meeks, Jesse Chris, and DensityDesign, and with Giorgio Caviglia, whom she brought to work with us, first as a visiting graduate student and later as a postdoc.

Giorgio Caviglia, during his postdoc years at Stanford, was the lead designer for the Grand Tour Project, from the sixty-nine architects’ case study, to the transformative parsing phase, to the creation of the database and interface for the Grand Tour Explorer. Giorgio brought his dedication to design that beautifully joins clarity and function to all his work on this project, and every page of A World Made by Travel bears his imprint.

A number of Stanford students subsequently collaborated on additional design and development. After Giorgio’s departure in 2015, Cody Leff extended his work beyond graduation, becoming lead designer and developer, with great creativity and adaptability, helping the project to navigate a period of enormous technological transition. Since autumn 2018, Ashwin Ramaswami has been lead developer and designer; our collaboration started when he was a CESTA undergraduate intern, and he continued, somehow, to work devotedly on this project even as he attended law school and afterwards, while running his campaign for state senate in Georgia. Ashwin also mentored other undergraduates who contributed development, in particular Matthew Tan and Joshua Singer. Ryan Tan was extremely helpful with many things, especially data visualization. SriRaagavi Ragothaman joined in leading development and dynamic data visualizations as a graduate student and continued beyond, working tirelessly to bring the project to completion. A number of other CESTA interns and Classics students helped with further data collection and editing: Kevin Garcia, Christine Phan, Noam Shemtov, Clara Romani, Justin Muchnick, Nicholas Clark, Elliot Jones, Sarah Pincus, and Ella Dolan. At CESTA, the project also benefitted from the insight of Erik Steiner, who, as creative director for CESTA’s Spatial History Project, contributed the careful georeferencing of spatial data. Ryan Heuser, during his time as associate director of another CESTA group, the LitLab, generously provided good counsel. CESTA has been essential to this project. I thank CESTA staff, past and present, for their support: Celena Allen, Amanda Bergado, Daniel Bush, Jonathan Clark, Carol Guthrie, Eyüp Eren Yürek, and previous CESTA directors Zephyr Frank and Elaine Treharne.

Essential were the 2016 and 2017 events—both titled “Digitizing the Grand Tour: A Workshop on the Worlds and Lives of Eighteenth-Century Travelers to Italy.” Many participants contributed essays to A World Made by Travel (see Scholars’ Essays) and others provided brilliant insights to our conversation: Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Jeffrey Collins, Paul Davis, Thea De Armond, Ryan Heuser, and Jonathan Sheehan. Thanks also to Dillon Gisch for impeccable organizational assistance and to Rachel Midura for work preparing essays for publication.

The students in the Grand Tour classes I have been teaching have contributed more than they know—in addition to those whose work is featured in Section VI. I want to acknowledge them all, along with the graduate students who co-taught with me: Sarah Murray, Rachel Midura, Nick Gardner, and Annie Lamar.

Colleagues generously helped me think through this project. I am grateful to Ben Albritton, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Rowan Dorin, Mateusz Fafinski, Paula Findlen, David Medeiros, Ian Morris, Grant Parker, Richard Saller, Walter Scheidel, Laura Stokes, Sarah Sussman, Merve Tekgürler, Elaine Treharne, Matthew Warner, and Caroline Winterer. Beyond Stanford, I treasure conversations over the years with Richard Ansell, Ruth Ahnert, Malcolm Baker, Melissa Calaresu, Emma Dench, Federica Favino, Michele Graffieti, Jo Guldi, Tony Grafton, Sue Marchand, Frank Salmon, Alain Schnapp, and Jake Soll. Dr. Kim Sloan generously shared with me her knowledge of Brinsley Ford and the origins of the Dictionary, for which I am immensely grateful. Input from hosts and audiences when I presented phases of the project has been invaluable: Venice University Ca’ Foscari, Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Colgate University, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, Università La Sapienza in Rome, the Annual Conference of the French Society for the Study of the Anglophone World, University of Verona, Sorbonne University in Paris, Guangqi International Center for Scholars at Normal University in Shanghai, Harvard Business School, University of Otago in Dunedin (NZ), Brown University, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Davidson College, the Society for Classical Studies in New Orleans, St. Anne’s College in Oxford (UK), and the Cini Foundation in Venice.

A World Made by Travel required a lot of travel. For their generous hospitality and good company, I thank friends in England (Melissa Calaresu, Miriam Leonard, Ruth Loshak, and Carrie Herbert), in Paris (Gianna Franceschini and Alain Schnapp), and in Italy (Teresa Ceserani, Barbara Colonna, Letizia de Sanctis, Francesca and Ludovico Geymonat, Laura Nuccilli, my mother Anita Piemonti, and my late father Remo Ceserani).

The writing of A World Made by Travel owes an immense debt to my colleague and mentor Susan Stephens, who has read, re-read, and discussed multiple drafts, at once exactingly and encouragingly—the book would not exist without her. Karen Newman has, again, made every page she read both more elegant and insightful. Nicole Coleman has been with me from start to finish—reading drafts, offering treasured advice for big concepts and invaluable and creative input for technical solutions, and providing her voice in the videos. Francesca Trivellato has read much and remains a most challenging and inspiring interlocutor. Feedback by John Brewer has been invaluable. I owe more than words can say to Christopher Rovee’s brilliant generosity in discussing every idea and engaging every sentence in this book and beyond.

Bringing the work of so many years to publication in the innovative program of Stanford University Press has been an exhilarating experience. I want to thank Alan Harvey and Jasmine Mulliken for their support, and Jasmine as well for ensuring the coherence of the whole. Finally, I thank the press’s anonymous reviewers.

The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art made this project possible by sharing the text of the Dictionary in digital form, allowing work in its archives, and supporting this publication. In particular, I thank Brian Allen, Mark Hallett, and Charlotte Brunskill.

I am grateful to Eliana Abu Hamdi and Mae Velloso-Lyons for their extraordinary help with this project at essential junctures. Teresa Ceserani has done exacting work on data editing as associate lead data curator. Thanks to Jake Coolidge for data visualizations for the scholars’ essays, and to Tommaso Elli for his excellent work on the final design and visualizations. Carly Rubin, Christie Cognevich, Tori Bush, and Mary Pappalardo offered essential copyediting. Orso Raymo offered help with data analysis, and I owe a large debt to Ross Perlin for reviewing and improving the whole.

I could not have brought this work to completion without generous institutional support. The launch of the project was supported, via Mapping the Republic of Letters, by grants from the NEH and the Stanford Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities. Since 2013, the contribution in kind of CESTA and the award in 2016 of a Roberta Bowman Denning Innovation in the Humanities Grant have been instrumental. The generous support of the Vice Provost and Dean of Research, the Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and the Classics Department, as well as the History Department, the Humanities Center, the Europe Center at Stanford, and a New Directions Mellon Fellowship have all contributed. The early workshops also enjoyed support from Stanford’s Division of Cultures, Languages and Literatures, and the Departments of English and of Art History.

***

A World Made by Travel is dedicated to Teresa Ceserani, Emilia Moore, and Christopher and Julian Rovee. They are the center of my world, and thus have for years borne the brunt of this project’s demands. I examined thousands of past lives, learning of the courage of earlier women and of the many who supported them, while they sustained and enriched mine.

Image Credits

Images on the homepage of A World Made by Travel all pertain to artists or places mentioned in the book. Clockwise, the images are:

Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734–1797 (1774). Cavern, near Naples. Yale Center for British Art, Bequest of Pamela Askew, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:10595;

Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1775–1851 (between 1817 and 1820). Vesuvius in Eruption. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:5472;

Thomas Jones, Buildings in Naples, 1782. Oil on paper, 14.2 x 21.6 cm. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (NMW A 89);

Attributed to James Miller, active 1773–1814 (undated). A Christening at the Vatican with Swiss Papal Guard, etc. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection., https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:11184;

Johann Gottfried Jentzsch, Grande roûte au mont St. Gotthardt, en Suisse non loin de l’Hospice di Jentzsch, c. 1802. Colored engraving, 34 x 50 cm. Austrian National Library, Austria.

William Pars, 1742–1782 (1775). A View at Lucerne . Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:14882.

The image on the main page of the Explorer section:

Bartolomeo Nazari, Gustavus Hamilton, 1710-46, 2nd Viscount Boyne, and Friends in a Ship’s Cabin, Caird Collection, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.