The Welsh painter Thomas Jones (1742–1803, travel years 1776–83), spent the last three years of his Italian sojourn in the city of Naples, from 1780 to 1783, and he left vivid accounts in words and images of his urban experience. His sensitivity to color and light and his attention to detail in his daily life are represented in a range of sources of unusual and extraordinary quality which have been used to reconstruct the lives and networks of British Grand Tour artists in Italy. This qualitative detail from Jones’s sources is in contrast to the quantitative weight of the information provided by the Grand Tour Explorer, which is primarily focused on British and Irish travelers. Yet, using word searches and making connections, the Grand Tour Explorer can bring us closer to travelers’ sensory experiences of urban life, which appear so vividly in Jones’s memoirs and paintings, as well as reveal interactions between Grand Tourists and Italians. The quantitative dimension afforded by the transformation of the Dictionary allows a more qualitative understanding of the travelers’ experience; for example, the length of time spent in a city might indicate the depth of engagement with the city by a Grand Tourist. In this essay, further analysis of the Explorer also shows the variety of the kinds of British travelers and residents living and dying in eighteenth-century Italy and the extent to which Italians have been obscured by the historiography on the Grand Tour. The life of Thomas Jones, therefore, provides an illuminating point of entry from which to explore the interlinked nature of Anglo-Italian cultural relations created by the Grand Tour.

Two portraits frame the life of Jones. The first portrait, by his friend Giuseppe (or Joseph) Liberati Marchi (1735?–1808), was painted in 1768, when Jones and the artist were visiting Wales from London (fig. 1).¹ The preeminent British portraitist of the late eighteenth century, Joshua Reynolds (1723–92, travel years 1750–52), had met the teenage Marchi while touring Italy and brought him back to Britain, where he worked as Reynolds’s assistant for more than forty years. The second portrait of Jones and his family (fig. 2), by Francesco Renaldi (1755–c. 1798), also painted in Wales, was done in 1797, by which time Jones had spent seven years in Italy and had returned home to run his family’s estate. Renaldi was a British painter of Italian parentage who had trained and exhibited in London. He had also stayed with Jones in Naples for three months in 1781 and would later spend ten years working as a painter in Bengal, before returning to Britain and painting this and other portraits of the Jones family.² Jones, Marchi, and Renaldi were friends and part of a network of painters with connections to the British Grand Tour in Italy. While Marchi (and even Renaldi, who was born in Britain) escaped the focused attention of the compiler of A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive by John Ingamells, 1997), Reynolds’s and Jones’s entries provide at least some mention of these two Anglo-Italian artists from which one can build a sharper picture of the interconnectedness and movement within the Explorer. These portraits of Thomas Jones frame a life that began and ended in Wales, but they hide the hybrid origins and cultural identities of this trio of painters, as well as the nature and depth of their lived experiences in Italy and beyond.

On March 11, 1783, Thomas Jones wrote: “I had been now for some time infected with the Swiss Malady and longed to see my Native Country once more.”³ After three years in Naples, Jones had had enough of his Italian experience and wanted to go home. He had failed to get enough commissions or find a powerful enough patron, British or Italian.⁴ Only a few weeks later, in early April 1783, did William Hamilton (1730–1803, travel years 1764–1800), the British emissary and chief “fixer” in Naples, finally agree to buy a large prospective view of the Campi Phlegrei (now lost), which Jones had almost finished.⁵ It was “too little, too late,” as Jones was determined to return to Britain with his family—Maria Moncke, a Danish woman who had been his housekeeper in Rome and whom he would later marry in London in 1789, and their two daughters (Anna Maria, b. 1780, travel years 1780–83; and Elizabeth Francesca, b. 1781, travel years 1781–83)—and they left for Britain a few months later in August 1783.⁶ The portrait of Jones’s family by Renaldi, painted after their return to Wales, shows the settled appearance of a prosperous Welsh landowner, belying Jones’s seven-year residency in Italy. Jones balances a palette, paintbrush, and painter’s mahlstick on one arm; there is a folder of prints in front of him and an unfinished landscape on an easel behind him. He looks away from his wife and daughters, who are portrayed as models of provincial propriety and accomplishment (Renaldi, or perhaps one of his brothers, peers over the scene from the center of the canvas.)⁷ Jones never returned to Italy; by the time of this portrait, his professional career as a painter was finished, and he would devote the final years of his life to running his family’s estate, writing in 1798 that his life had become “with little interruptions, one uniform scene of domestick Retirement—at times, indeed, amusing myself with my beloved Art,” painting for his own amusement.⁸

For three years, Jones had lived at the center of one of the cultural capitals of Europe—attending the opera, taking day trips to Sorrento by boat, befriending Italian painters, and buying fresh peas from street vendors. His Neapolitan life can be found in the many sources that he left behind—his paintings of the city, his “Memoirs” cited above (based on a diary that he kept at the time at his side, now lost) and a full set of household accounts.⁹ None of this material is new and yet, while art historians have used the “Memoirs” and accounts in their analysis of his paintings, few have analyzed these sources, either written or painted, together, as careful and evocative observations of urban life. Jones’s visual representations of Naples as a city, especially its buildings and urban spaces, are unique for this period and also for what looks like their abstraction and the absence of any people. Jones’s paintings of the city’s rooftops and spaces conform neither to the contemporary taste for ethnographic representations of Neapolitan street culture, made popular by painters such as Pietro Fabris, nor for the panoramic views of the city by his friend Giovanni Battista Lusieri.¹⁰ All of Jones’s Neapolitan cityscapes were painted on paper, suggesting that, like his diary entries, they were his private visual musings and not meant for sale or display to Grand Tourists.

These textual and visual sources evoke urban experience on the Grand Tour—the sounds of streets, the surfaces of buildings, the light hitting canvas awnings. This attention to (sensory) detail in relation to the urban experience of visitors to Italian cities is not easily replicated in the entries of the Dictionary or in their digital transformation in the Grand Tour Explorer. Using the “free-search” function in the Explorer for words relating to the sensory and spatial experience of urban life—such as smoke, noise, crowd, carriage, cart, stall, or porter—leads to just a few faint traces. For example, bells appear in an anecdote about Frederick Augustus Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol’s (1730–1803, travel years 1765–66, 1770–72, 1777–79, 1785–86, 1789–90, 1794–1803) aversion to them as a religious procession passed by his hotel in Siena, which the Dictionary, and hence the Explorer, record from an early nineteenth-century memoir.¹¹ While Jones’s account of the “Chaos of Noises Filth and Confusion” around his first apartment in Naples is cited from the “Memoirs,” in the Dictionary’s entry and the Explorer, the reasons for the chaos or his concern about putting off prospective clients are not.¹²

Using Jones’s tour and, in particular, his residence in Naples, as a starting point, this essay seeks to illuminate cases in which the British experience of Italian cities was sustained and engaged, when tourists engaged more deeply with their Italian counterparts and when their stays stretched longer—for some, in fact, becoming lifelong. Close consideration of Jones’s paintings and accounts provides clues to guide a “distant reading” through the Explorer. Could the digital transformation operated by the Explorer allow us to glean more of the Italian presence from the Dictionary’s pages? Seeking to grasp the elusive sensory experience of eighteenth-century travelers, could the interpersonal and the temporal dimensions of travel that the Explorer offers help us better color our vision of the British Grand Tour?

Representing Naples in the Paintings and Words of Thomas Jones

On his visit to Naples, the German painter Jacob Philipp Hackert complimented Jones, recognizing their affinity as painters who paid “due attention to the Detail—that is to say, minute finishing.”¹³ This exactness of detail led to the rediscovery of Jones’s work in the mid-twentieth century; this same exactness comes through in his “Memoirs,” as he evokes the sounds and smells of the streets of Italian cities in words. His eye and ear for these details are apparent from the beginning of his tour in Italy, as he passes through different cities, making observations along the way, perhaps distinguishing himself from other Grand Tourists who pay no heed to what happens outside their carriages. For instance, a walk early in the morning brings an observation about the different ways that porters carry their goods in Turin and Milan. Jones then continues: “It being cold foggy weather, all the men were muffled up to their noses in cloaks, or loose great Coats, with the Sleeves hanging down according to the Italian custom, and Smoking out of curved wooden pipes, the bowls of which only appeared.”¹⁴ This level of evocative detail extends to descriptions of other environments in which the senses dominate. In Rome, his breath “stop’d” as he entered a room full of smoking Scandinavians and Slavs in Rome,¹⁵ and, in the heat of late September, he recalls, “I was kept in a gentle perspiration, sitting in my Shirt & thin linnen Drawers without Stockens—with the Windows open—and in this dress I sat down to paint.”¹⁶ He recounts a night at the opera in Naples with Giuseppe Plura (b. 1753, travel years 1778–81), which he had to abandon “as the noise was so great that we could not hear the Performers, and the dazzling Glare of the Candles & looking-glasses made me quite giddy.”¹⁷ His descriptions are not so much an indication of his eye and ear for ethnographic detail but of his sensitivity to the senses—of sight, sound, and smell.

His paintings of the city are the visual equivalent of these sensory descriptions—the light hitting the pitted surface of walls, the dark cavities of building interiors. These descriptions and paintings establish Jones as an evocative witness to urban life.

In his “Memoirs,” Jones also gives us clues to his immersion in Italian culture. Like many Grand Tourists, he literally carried ideas about Italians in his jacket pocket as he traveled, but these guidebooks were soon put to the test by his actual interactions with people. Not long after arriving in Rome, he seemed genuinely surprised not to be knifed after a night of conversation with “three sprightly girls,” the daughters of an innkeeper near Frascati:

We were joined by a Couple of young Fellows muffled up to the nose in their long cloaks—I had been so prepossessed, by books, with frightful ideas of Italian jealousy and Italian revenge, that I sat in Agony for the Consequence, nor could my Companions reasoning or ridicule entirely divert me of it—However we at length cheerfully sat down to supper—and soon after went to bed and slept soundly, devoid of Care.¹⁸

By 1779, Jones knew Italian well enough to write love letters for his friend William Pars (1742–82, travel years 1775–82), with pleasing results; “the favourable reception and the kind answers” that Pars received to these “Amorous Epistles” was testimony to Jones’s skill in written Italian.¹⁹ From Naples in 1782, Jones remarked that he had not seen an English newspaper since leaving Rome two years earlier.²⁰ His immersion is also evidenced in the account book in which he recorded his expenses in Naples, shifting suddenly from English to Italian on the day after he slept in his apartment in front of the Dogana del Sale (depicted in fig. 3), just days after arriving in the city.²¹

The depth of Jones’s immersion in Naples distinguishes him from many British Grand Tourists. As he had promised himself after his first unsuccessful meeting with Hamilton in May 1780, he avoided the company of English tourists as much as he could and, instead, kept company with Italians, with whom he claims to have kept up a correspondence years after he left Italy (although none of it survives).²² Within months of Renaldi’s arrival in Naples in July 1781, he had introduced Jones to the Italian painters Giuseppe Bonito and Luigi Micheli; in turn, Micheli lived on the same street as Giambattista Lusieri, who also became Jones’s friend.²³ Micheli and Lusieri appear respectively as Don Luigi and Don Titta in Jones’s “Memoirs.” (Lusieri also appears in four other entries in the Explorer by this nickname, transcribed variously as Don Titta, Don Teta, and Don Tito.)²⁴ Jones’s relationship with these Italian artists is part of a larger web of interconnections that extends well beyond the bounds of the Explorer to include, for instance, overlapping circles of friendship and acquaintance with French artists in Naples such as Pierre-Jacques Volaire.²⁵ These are relationships of varying intensities with non-British artists whose works surfaced in British country-house collections—relationships that begin to come into view also through the Explorer as visualized in figure 4.

This brief analysis of Jones’s paintings and “Memoirs” shows the extent to which both are witness to his Neapolitan life. Jones lived in three residences across the city—the first near the Dogana di Sale, which kept him close to the clamor of the warehouses and port; the second near Capodimonte, which kept him close to his new Italian artist friends Lusieri and Micheli; and the third, behind Chiaia, which brought him closer to the “court side” of town and represented a final attempt to find the Grand Tourist patrons that he so desired. His evocation of urban life in Naples illustrates how he could escape the rhetorical and visual tropes of British representations of Italy. When he was writing his “Memoirs,” which he finished fifteen years after his return to Britain in 1798, he reflected on his delight, early during his time in Italy, that he was so “familiarized with, & enamoured of Italian forms,” having copied Italian landscapes under the tutelage of Richard Wilson in London in the 1760s (1713–82, travel years 1750–56/57).²⁶ But Jones’s cityscapes show his willingness to look elsewhere for inspiration. In this way, he was able to develop his own unique visual style, which recorded the light, space, and textures that surrounded him in the city of Naples.

Jones’s life and work also reveal the value of British artists as historical informants and the ways in which we can find Italian and British experience of Italy in the extraordinary wealth of material that came out of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Can the Explorer allow researchers to develop and build more histories of these connections, engagements, and exchanges with Italy and Italians, while engaging with the qualitative analyses of the many (and often familiar) sources produced by the Grand Tour?

(Word) Searching for Italians

Thomas Jones claimed that Romans divided British travelers into three classes: Artisti (“here, as well for Study and Improvement, as emolument by their profession”), Mezzi-Cavalieri (“who lived genteely, independent of any profession, and kept a servant”), and the true Cavalieri or Milordi Inglesi (“those who moved in a Circle of Superior Splendour”).²⁷ Jones himself was uncertain about his own place within these first two categories, and his life story justifies that ambivalence.²⁸ What is not included in his characterization is a fourth crossover class of British residents who lived and worked in Italian cities—diplomats, merchants, and men who served the Grand Tour industry or those who might have come to Italy as artists or gentlemen but then set up a household in Italy, becoming longer-term residents. William Hamilton, the British emissary to Naples, is perhaps the best known of longer term residents, living in the city more or less continuously, with some brief breaks in England and other parts of Italy, between 1764 and 1800; his enduring presence and power in the city and at the Bourbon court makes him a particularly important node from which to study the British community in Naples, Grand Tourists in particular. There were also British merchants with long-standing relationships to the city for which further archival research in the Italian archives would be necessary to go beyond the Grand Tour Explorer (curiously, there is another William Hamilton (travel years 1753–57), “the oldest and most Eminent Merchant” in the city of Naples, who appears twice in the records, once in 1753 and again in 1757).²⁹ The British ciceroni who served the tourist industry were important intermediaries between the British community and Italians and, by necessity, had specific knowledge of Italian cities to offer to their clients, as Carole Paul’s essay on ciceroni demonstrates. These distinctions between Grand Tourists and longer-term residents necessarily reveal that cities could be lived in as more than simply places of amusement, education, or exploitation.

Jones’s “Memoirs” indicate a variety of important relationships formed not just with other long-term British residents but also with Italians. During his professional travails, he wrote, desolately, “Looking upon my self as deserted by my Countrymen—the depression of my Spirits was such, that I endeavored avoiding as much as possible those places where I was most likely to meet them.”³⁰ As noted above, Jones was determined to make friends with some local Italian artists, friendships that endured beyond his return to Wales three years later. Yet these Italian men—and Italian women, as Catherine Sama’s essay on Rosalba Carriera shows—are largely absent from Grand Tour scholarship as a whole.³¹

As its title indicates, the Dictionary set out to include only entries relating to British and Irish travelers and did not include entries related to the constellation of Italians involved in the Grand Tour. There are, however, brief biographical notes at the back of the Grand Tour Dictionary dedicated to “select foreign artists, antiquaries, and diplomats . . . whose names recur in the Dictionary.” Two-thirds of these supplementary characters are identified as Italian (forty-one out of a total sixty-two); of these, the majority are artists long dead before the eighteenth century, which highlights the antiquarian and artistic interests of the Grand Tour as filtered through the hands of Brinsley Ford, Ingamells, and their collaborators.³² The Dictionary takes an idiosyncratic approach to a number of Anglo-Italians: it grants no entries, for example, to Marchi or Renaldi, who had painted Thomas Jones and his family before and after his time in Italy, nor do these two artists appear in the supplementary biographies at the back of the Dictionary. In contrast, Giuseppe (or Joseph) Plura, the son of a Turinese sculptor who had settled in Bath, and a traveling companion for Jones on his first trip to Naples, is included among the Dictionary’s entries.³³ This difficulty of “fixing” as either British or Italian the hybrid nature of family lives and career trajectories that crossed Britain and Italy is clear, for example, in the case of the musical performers Anna Storace (1766–1817, travel years 1778–84, c. 1787–c. 1801) and Stephen Storace (1763–96, travel years c. 1775–81), both of whom were born and died in Britain but whose professional life was only recorded by Grand Tourists when they were in Italy.

The Dictionary’s pages are peppered with mentions of Italian names, and an advantage of the digital Explorer is that it allows us to find many of these Italians who did not merit individual recognition in the original print text. Using the “free-search” function, one can produce a number of matching entries for a more comprehensive review “by hand,” and the Explorer’s mentioned names permit a more systematic search for Italian presence as well. Jones provides a good example: the graph visualizing the names mentioned in his entry includes a third of individuals, mostly Italians and other foreigners, who do not have entries in the Dictionary, drawing on a wider field of names and connections to our study of Jones’s life in Italy (see fig. 4).

Many Italians appearing in the Dictionary’s entries are artists, however, and their mention only relates to specific works of architecture or art that Grand Tourists had seen or were buying (works by Palladio, Guercino, and Batoni, for example). The Dictionary must have been an important starting point for Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby’s reconstruction of the antiquities market in eighteenth-century Rome, in which many Italians engaged daily with British agents such as Gavin Hamilton (1723–98, travel years 1748–50, 1756–98), Thomas Jenkins (1722–98, travel years 1751–98), and Robert Fagan (1761–1816, travel years 1781–82, 1784–1814, c. 1815–16), but who remain to be studied in further detail.³⁴ Many other entries make mention of British painters and architects both known, such as Carlo Fontana, and unknown, such as “Signor Abramo Paris,” teacher of the Scottish architect James Gibb (1682–1754, travel years 1703–8).

In fact, if one searches for “Signor” in the entries, a number of Italians come up (along with some British travelers such as Joanna Hart [travel years 1756–57], who appears as “Signora Giovanna Harz” in the citation of a primary source).³⁵ In many cases, these Italians are difficult or impossible to trace without further archival research. For example, “Signor Giacomo” was paid for some architectural plans and for teaching Thomas Coke of Holkham (1697–1759, travel years 1713–17). Less well-known artists, copyists, and modelers who served the Grand Tour community also turn up in a search under Signor: for example, George Craster (1735–72, travel years 1761–62), an army officer from Craster, Northumbria, commissioned two portraits by Batoni and Nathaniel Dance (1735–1811, travel years 1754–66), but he also commissioned “copies in miniature by signora Tibaldi.”³⁶ Agents such as those in Rome also met the collecting needs of British tourists in other Italian cities, such as Signor Magnolfi, the Florentine agent for the antiquary John Talman (1677–1726, travel years 1699–1702, 1709–17, 1719, 1721, 1723). More signori appear as part of the Grand Tour “service” community including guides and companions such as “Signor Armano of Bologna,” who accompanied Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838, travel years 1785–87, 1788–91), for the voyage from Tuscany to Rome or Signora Minerbetti, Horace Mann’s cicisbea, who presented Lady Mary Tufton (1723–1806, travel years 1773–78)—the wife of the Scottish aristocrat William Duncan (c. 1715–74, travel years 1773–74)—to the Grand Duke of Florence.³⁷

Encounters with Italian signori, however, do not always imply some sort of transcultural understanding or exchange with British travelers. We know that guidebooks framed the responses of British travelers to Italian life, carrying with them characterizations of Italy inherited from anti-Catholic rhetoric developed since the Reformation (and compounded by ancient climatic theories revived by Montesquieu and others in the eighteenth century).³⁸ We also know that the British traveling community often stuck together, socializing and traveling in groups and using the same service networks. As William Mildmay (c. 1705–71, travel years 1730–31) suggests in his description on arriving in Leghorn/Livorno in 1730, many British travelers and residents lived in close-knit English-speaking communities; he writes that “there are computed to be about 43 English families at present & our language is as frequently heard in the streets & coffee houses, as the Italian itself.” These communities were well-served: Thomas Pelham (1756–1826, travel years 1777, 1792–93), for instance, was thrilled to have found in Florence a Signor Molini, who “will sell me all kind of English things . . . from Birmingham”; and David Ker (1742–1811, travel years 1792–94), an Irishman, boasted that he had made “an Italian servant we had at Florence into a very good English Cook.” Food was a particular concern for Grand Tourists, many of them overcome by a longing for roast beef and disdain for French sauces as soon as they left the shores of England.³⁹ Italian food seems to have fared better in diaries and travel accounts, although Grand Tourists were always looking for a good roast. After three months in Italy, Jones notes that he and his companion “were both heartily sick of the Italian Soups & Stews . . . and were obliged to be our own cooks”; his friends were “very glad to sit down to a piece of Roast Beef and Plumb pudding.”⁴⁰ Later, in his memoirs, however, we can see Jones adapting to a new culinary regime. In the final months of his stay in Italy, Jones recorded a visit to “a large Manufactory of Maccaroni” on the outskirts of Naples, near Torre Annunziata (where the manufacturing of pastasciutta continues today), and he bought twenty-four pounds of macaroni as part of his food supplies for his family’s trip home to England by sea in August 1783.⁴¹ While Grand Tourists often longed for English food while away from home, this taste for Italian food in England was not unusual; a number of them wanted to recreate these new tastes and flavors, shipping home Chianti wine and Parmesan cheese and, after their return, buying more Italian food from fashionable grocers in London.⁴² Jones’s reliance on such a large amount of macaroni as a foodstuff for his trip home to England confirms the depth of his and his family’s alimentary acculturation during his long residency in the city.⁴³

Travel to Italy, at least dating from the Renaissance, was meant to be educational, and in the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour had not yet lost its didactic function. Travelers not only acquired wheels of Parmesan cheese and antique Roman objects to ship back to Britain, but many were also keen to gain some knowledge of the modern Italian language.⁴⁴ Grammar books were produced specifically for this purpose,⁴⁵ and a number of signori in the Explorer provided instruction in Italian. When the antiquarian Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755, travel years 1720–26) returned to Rome in the autumn of 1721, he “learned that his language master had died but within four days he had found another, ‘Signore de la Mothe.’” In Rome, in the summer of 1777, Thomas Pelham spent his mornings “employed in learning Italian & the History of Italy,” and when he was in Florence in the autumn, he hired his father’s former Italian-language teacher, the Abbé Pellori. There were, of course, Italians who could speak English and entertain and keep the British travelers company. Thomas Jones noted with pleasure that, after a day’s sightseeing during a short stay in Bologna, on his way down to Rome, he had “met Dr Geraldi, who spoke good English, at the Cof-House.”⁴⁶ One British resident in Florence wrote that since William Weddell (1736–92, travel years 1764–65) and his companion spoke no Italian or French and “the Society of the Inhabitants here did not give them much pleasure, they chose to spend their evenings with ‘Signor Cassali.’”⁴⁷

As these examples suggest, British travelers did indeed form relationships with Italian signori. Some of them were strictly financial, as this short but enigmatic entry for Isabella Littlejohn (travel year 1790) suggests: “James Byres borrowed money from Isabella Littlejohn (Signora Francesco Tribuzzi) in 1790.” For many travelers, their primary and daily contact with Italians was as their tenants or guests, such as the portrait painter William Keeble (or Keable) (1714–74, travel years 1761–74), who “lived in the house of Domenico Gandolfi” when he was in Bologna. There were also professional relationships. The Irish painter James Barry (1741–1806, travel years 1766–71) attributed his election to the Accademia Clementina “to the obliging dispositions of two friends of mine here, Mr Keable and Signor Bianconi.” Castruccio Bonamici commissioned the same Keeble to paint his portrait in Naples.⁴⁸ Some of these financial arrangements also betray sentimental relationships—such as the annuity left in the will of John Bouverie (c. 1722–50, travel years 1741–42, 1745–46, 1749–50) to “Signora Teresa Tacconio of Bologna.” As Jeremy Black has reiterated, the Grand Tour also provided opportunities for sexual experimentation and social transgression for British travelers away from home.⁴⁹ For example, the Third Earl of Peterborough, Charles Mordaunt (1658–1735, travel years 1706–7, 1711–12, 1714, 1715, 1716–18, 1719–20) was known to stay in Bologna, “where he has been many times,” for private reasons “regarding his engagement to Signora Catina.” Many of these characters—from Signor Giacomo to Signora Catina—remain unknown, and the unevenness of the use of biographical data in the Dictionary means that these sorts of relationships are sometimes difficult to quantify across the Explorer.

Another way to gauge British engagement with Italian society would be to examine the number of “travelers” who married Italians. In most cases, this implies a reconsideration of terms such as Grand Tourists and travelers (which Brinsley Ford, Ingamells, and their collaborators implicitly did by including British residents in the Dictionary). Further archival research in cities such as Leghorn/Livorno, where there had been a continuous presence of British merchants since the early modern period, would be one way forward, as Simon Macdonald’s research on the British resident community in Paris has so fruitfully shown.⁵⁰ More research could also be done on the importance of the resident British community that serviced travelers’ needs, their local knowledge commodified for this shifting group of Grand Tourists. In the Explorer, the information regarding marriage is found in the main headings of each entry, although there is not yet a separate category to search this information across entries (while one can of course do such a search within the downloaded data set). A casual search found two Irish Catholics married to Italian women—the dealer Robert Fagan, who lived in Italy for thirty years and was married twice to young Italian women, and David Ker (1742–1811, travel years 1792–94), who spent two years in Italy with his three daughters after the death of his Venetian wife, Maddalena Guardi, in 1785.⁵¹ There is also the case of Eliza Ashburner (travel years 1783–1800), “a lady-in-waiting to one of the daughters of the Queen of Naples,” who had married Signor Perconte (a secretario refferendario del Regno) in June 1800, presumably in the aftermath of the rushed retreat of the Bourbon court to Naples. A more focused word search using Italian first names found a number of Britons married to Italians—for example, the search for a common first name, Giovanna, found George Jackson (1692–1763, travel years c. 1713–63), described as a diplomat and merchant in the Dictionary. Married to an Italian Catholic, Mary Joanna Rimaldini, Jackson lived most of his life (fifty years of it) in Leghorn/Livorno and served a two-year stint as the British consul in Genoa; he died in Ancona, presumably while visiting his daughter.⁵² Testimony to his rootedness in Italian society is that the cardinal from whom he received special dispensation to marry as a Protestant became Pope Benedict XIV and was the godfather of Jackson’s eldest son, Prospero. George Jackson’s knowledge of Italian culture clearly went beyond polite conversation; he gathered an enormous library of more than three thousand books and manuscripts in Italian and Latin for which he published a catalog in 1756.⁵³ Jackson was buried in the English cemetery in Leghorn/Livorno, and his tombstone still carries the spelling mistakes in English of the Italian stone mason who carved it.⁵⁴ A search for the male equivalent, Giovanni, brings up the husband of Anna Maria Jenkins (travel years 1788–94), who spent four years in Rome with her uncle, the antiquary Thomas Jenkins;⁵⁵ Anna Maria married Giovanni Martinez, “the nephew of Thomas Jenkins’s neighbor on the Corso,” in 1794, but there is no further notice of her life in Italy or in England. Marriage to an Italian, of course, is not the only way to gauge the rootedness of British residents in Italy. The unmarried British Abbés and Monsignors who pop up throughout the Dictionary belie the significant number of British Catholics (including Stuart sympathizers) who made Rome their home over many years. Nonetheless, this directed and random word searching has brought to light a number of Italians whose relationship with Britons went beyond buying art or social visits in aristocratic palaces. In turn, further research could reveal more about British travelers who became residents, sometimes working for British Grand Tourists, occasionally marrying Italians, living out their lives in Italy, and sometimes dying there as well.

Using Data to Visualize the British Experience in Italy

Might the rich travel data contained in the Explorer offer insights or ways to approach the question of British engagement with Italian urban life? In many ways, the Explorer confirms the well-worn narrative, with the largest number of travelers going to Rome (3,382), followed by Florence (2,154), Venice (2,135), and Naples (1,943). It is common knowledge that travel itineraries on the Grand Tour varied, some travelers completing their travels over a few months, others over a few years, most often with the intention of returning home to Britain. We also know that there were seasonal patterns to visits to particular cities; as Rosemary Sweet reminds us, travelers often went to Naples for Lent to get away from the boredom of Rome or, for shorter periods, to Venice for Carnival.⁵⁶ Grand Tour itineraries followed these seasonal ebbs and flows; for instance, the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood each year on September 22 was a must-see for many tourists, including Jones, who managed to combine his first visit to Naples in September 1778 to time with the feast day of the city’s patron saint and an eruption of Vesuvius.⁵⁷ The regular eruptions of Vesuvius in the eighteenth century brought visitors to Naples within days, as Goethe notes in his entry from November 24, 1787: “At the moment it seems as if all the art treasures of Rome were of no account; all the foreigners have interrupted their sightseeing tour and are hurrying off to Naples.”⁵⁸ Further research could track the known eruptions of Vesuvius with the arrival dates of tourists using the Explorer, as well as map the seasonal patterns of visitors to the city according to religious festivals (for example, Lent to Easter) or to the weather (for example, avoiding the intensity of the summer heat or enjoying the mild winter months in Naples).

Yet popularity of “travel places” alone is only one possible approach, and it is complicated by the absences in the archive. First, there is the matter of the often absent details of the journey to and within Italy. We have to assume that most Grand Tourists in the database started their travels in Britain, arriving by land or sea from France, from further east by land, or sailing around Gibraltar. “Gateway” cities, searched as “travel places” in the Explorer, included Turin (951), Milan (590), and Bologna (673) on the way to Rome from France, or Leghorn/Livorno (979, although three for Leghorn/Livorno) if arriving by sea to Florence, or smaller stops such as Terracina (13) on the way to Naples. While tourists must have stopped through many of these cities en route, they appear much less popular than the major destination cities (as “travel places”): this, of course, has to do with the fact that Grand Tourists did not always record their stays in their diaries and memoirs, or that they were not included by Brinsley Ford, Ingamells, and their collaborators, even though we know of the existence of inns that served these popular routes.

The Explorer allows us to take a different approach to the qualities of stays in cities, and, in turn, travelers’ engagement with Italian life. Even within the biography of one traveler, there is variety in the length as well as the quality of visits. Thomas Jones first stayed in Naples for just four months in 1778, but he returned two years later and stayed for three years, until 1783. The first visit in his memoirs records a typical Grand Tour itinerary, with trips to the main sites in and around the city, while his second is taken up by the more mundane business of finding accommodation, moving furniture, and buying paints.⁵⁹ Continuing to use Jones as our guide, we can look for “travelers” who stayed longer in any city and who might have engaged more substantially with Italian urban life.

The absences in the archive continue to shape the possibilities and results of such an exploration. Data often remains incomplete for travelers who did not keep diaries as detailed as Jones’s or whose best records remain in Italian archives, unincorporated in the Dictionary. Some indicate approximate dates of stay or just a year, while others give exact dates of stays; compare, for instance, Jones’s “travels” with his friend William Pars’s in the Explorer, whose dates were partially reconstructed by using Jones’s “Memoirs.” All in all, about a quarter of travelers are recorded with enough detail to calculate their duration of stay (1,450 of 6,007).⁶⁰

Figures 5 and 6 replicate many of the noted patterns across the data. Figure 5 demonstrates that Rome, Florence, Venice, and Naples all recorded a number of visitors roughly proportionate to the whole of the Explorer data. Figure 6 shows the median number of days per visit to each of the cities. While Naples had only the fourth-largest number of visitors, the average length of stay in the city (41.5 days) was nearly as long as that in Rome (46) and far longer than all other popular cities.

Figure 7 shows the division of travelers by occupation but indicates the difficulty of data absence in many categories. While diplomats, merchants, painters, and statesmen represent some of the most numerous groups, there are still significant limitations to the dating of their travels. The long residencies of men such as George Jackson as a merchant in Leghorn/Livorno stand out immediately; in fact, only three merchants have precise enough dating to be included within the subset, N. Brooke (travel years 1786–97), George Chetham (1678–1701, travel years 1700–1701), and Christopher Hanbury (c. 1661–1716, travel years 1704–16). We know anecdotally and from current research that focuses on Rome that artists spent extensive periods of time—in some cases, their entire working life—in the city.⁶¹ But the result for a city like Leghorn/Livorno is harder to read. Nonetheless the length of stay in Naples across these occupation groups indicates the greater depth of British engagement with the urban life in Naples by Grand Tourists.

The Explorer allows us to easily compare the death dates of travelers against their time of travel to the city as another potential indicator of length of stay. While more Britons “saw Rome and died” (64), there were a considerable number of British travelers who can be inferred to have died in Naples (40)—which echoes the expression in Italian, Vedi Napoli e muore. There were more deaths proportionally in Naples than in Florence (22) and Venice (17) where visitors often stayed for less time. In fact, the next largest number of British deaths after those in Rome and Naples are those in Leghorn/Livorno (70), which represents 7.2 percent of the overall number of travelers to the Tuscan port (977). At first glance, the number of deaths in Leghorn/Livorno appears representative of the resident community of merchants who, like George Jackson, lived their adult life there and became old in the city and of the rich sources about the Leghorn/Livorno cemeteries available to the Dictionary’s compilers, which is not available for other cities. Alternatively, it might have to do with the fact that British ships stopped in the port on their way to Britain, as it seems was the case for Edward (c. 1791–97, travel year 1797) and Richard Lee (c. 1792–97, travel year 1797), who died at ages six and four years on their way from Smyrna, having lost their sister (c. 1792–97, travel year 1797) in Naples on the way.⁶² We know that many British travelers in poor health went to Naples with the belief that the mild climate of the city would improve their health, and we know that some of these “invalids” died there.⁶³

As these final figures demonstrate, British Grand Tourists engaged with Italian society beyond the buying of antiquities and visiting of churches on the shorter visits that were common in most of the cities of the Grand Tour. The evidence from Naples shows that many tourists stayed longer. Like Rome, Naples offered many opportunities for tourists and, to some extent, artists; this might have changed over time, of course, as the sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii and their excavated treasures became unique draws to the city by the end of the eighteenth century. The evocative memoirs and paintings of Thomas Jones clearly demonstrate the depth of the British engagement with Italian cityscapes, particularly that of Naples. The Explorer provides several methods for putting that knowledge in a greater context, helping us to better understand whether Thomas Jones’s engagement with the city was as exceptional as it seems.

Acknowledgements

For their advice or bibliographical help in the writing of this essay, I would like to thank John Gallagher, Simon Macdonald, Renaud Morieux, Katie Scott, Simon Schaffer, and especially Tim Spiers. I would also like to thank Giovanna Ceserani, Rachel Midura, and Mae Velloso-Lyons for their patience and contributions to the final version.

Notes