As the itinerant wizard Gandalf wrote to the then domestically inclined hobbit Frodo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, “not all those who wander are lost.”¹ Indeed, as the recent brouhaha over the “wanderlust gene” DRD4-7R testifies, travel is a constant of human experience inflected in myriad ways by history, literature, and life—from the Aboriginal walkabout and the Homeric epics through the Jungian archetype of “the wanderer” to Tripadvisor.com and Ibiza stag parties.² People travel to eat, to learn, and to conquer. They travel in search of architectural inspiration, for reasons of health, and simply because destinations were “there,” in Edmund Hillary’s felicitous formulation. Within this swath of human history, my interest lies with a particular kind of purposeful travel that I would define as “economic.” By this I do not mean frugal or “low-cost” or, for that matter, more permanent migration in search of a livelihood but travel for the purpose of improving the management of the material world—theoretically or practically, individually or collectively—more the Jesuit François Xavier d’Entrecolles discovering the secrets of Chinese porcelain in 1712 than, say, Ryanair.³ Economic journeys are, by default, emulative in aspiration if not in practice, as they are driven by the desire to discover better ways of doing and thinking in the economic sphere—not to mention to establish commercial linkages and networks. Such travels represent a crucial vector of globalization both past and present.⁴

In the wake of East Timor’s new independence in 2002, for example, future Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri embarked on a global tour of “relevant” countries, ranging from Singapore to Nauru to Norway, to “learn from their experiences” and choose which one to emulate as a model of national political economy.⁵ A decade later, the Wenzhou businessman Sun Jian decided to fly to Lagos, Nigeria, after having considered everything from Bangladesh to Uzbekistan, because he had heard of opportunities there for outsourcing of Chinese manufacturing.⁶ These leaders’ modes of travel, one informed by macro- and the other by microeconomic concerns, harken back to the origins of international commerce and communication itself, to the conceptual beginnings of what we today call globalization.⁷ Examples of such economic tours are bountiful, stretching back into the dimmest eons of recorded history; eighteenth-century Europe positively brimmed with them.⁸ Indeed, the mythical “Grand Tour” in early modern Europe, of which these forms of instructive travel represent a woefully neglected aspect, has come to be seen as one of the cardinal institutions of the Enlightenment.⁹

Scholars have recently called for a broader analysis of the Grand Tour, including, among other things, the women and children, servants and middlemen, foreigners and Italians among whom wealthy young Britons traveled. Though I am principally interested in the role of travel in early modern political economy, this essay contributes to expanding the historical parameters of Grand Tourism.¹⁰ I have explored elsewhere how the theories and practices of countries that “forged ahead,” to quote the Stanford economist Moses Abramowitz, were emulated in Europe through the medium of translation. Relatedly, I would argue that another type of “Grand Tour” emerged in the eighteenth century, in which travelers visited countries of similar or more advanced economic development and geopolitical standing for both technological and governmental inspiration—to emulate, in short, foreign best practices.¹¹ The exercise of collecting strategic intelligence abroad had, of course, been a primary task of spies and ambassadors in early modern Europe, but a broader and more diverse set of travelers came to carry out this activity over the course of the eighteenth century. As the statesman, intellectual, and future 117th Doge of Venice Marco Foscarini put it in a 1742 ambassadorial report from Turin, one of the primary purposes of such accounts had historically been not merely to record events but to survey the trade networks, industries, and armies of different countries. Yet, “as these became familiar with the passing of time, and common knowledge because of the new facility of travel, which rendered it more frequent, and because of the infinite number of published books comprehensively treating of these issues, one has, not without reason, abandoned this form of report over the past century and reduced it to a kind of particular history containing the maxims, councils, and arcane origins of the things that took place during the duration of any given Ambassadorship.”¹²

The increasing frequency of travel, along with the exploding volume of publications in early modern Europe, changed the economy of intelligence on the continent, as a far wider spectrum of travelers and thinkers turned to questions of political economy and accumulated insights became common knowledge.¹³ Yet Foscarini insisted that travel could still offer strategic insights into the economic administration and economic systems of competing polities, even offering “perfect examples to imitate.”¹⁴ Like textual translation, travel thus remained one of the early modern period’s principal vehicles of both international emulation and the standardization of best practices in the Western world, not to mention, in some cases, its transoceanic connections.¹⁵ “The subject of Finances,” the future US president John Adams mused, could be learned only “from books or from Travel.”¹⁶ For similar reasons, his fellow founder and future President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826, travel year 1787) visited Piedmont in 1787 as part of his Grand Tour to study rice-growing practices. Like many contemporary traveling collectors, Jefferson acquired rare books in Italy, including a “copy of Polybius, the best edition,” but he readily admitted that “I scarcely got into classical ground . . . in architecture, painting, sculpture, I found much amusement; but more than all in their agriculture, many objects of which might be adopted with us to great advantage.”¹⁷ Though Jefferson indulged in many of the activities of the stereotypical Grand Tourist, his itinerary was fundamentally inflected by exigencies of political economy.

Macro- and microeconomic interests sometimes overlapped during what one might call “Economic Grand Tours,” as was the case when the Milanese merchant and large-scale textile manufacturer Antonio Greppi traveled most of Europe, not merely in search of business opportunities but to familiarize himself with the theoretical study of international political economy.¹⁸ Direct experience lent authority in economic affairs, as the Abruzzo adventurer Troiano Odazi proved when he successfully advertised his extensive travels when seeking a professorship in political economy at the University of Naples.¹⁹ The Germanic ideal of Bildung so essential to the Grand Tour was, after all, pursued for individual as well as societal ends.²⁰ Even the aesthetic language that Grand Tourists habitually employed to describe sublime vistas of Roman ruins and bucolic bliss found economic expression in some cases. When the Milanese patrician and scholar Alessandro Verri first visited England, for example, he marveled at the bellissima veduta not of Dover’s white cliffs but rather of London along the banks of the Thames, “covered with merchant ships, which form a forest of trees and another city on the sea.”²¹

The Grand Tour Explorer provides a remarkable tool for considering the continental experiences of travelers from what was by many accounts the world’s most advanced economy, Britain, as they ventured to Italy, a onetime seat of commercial power in Europe then in relative decline.²² Yet, while the Explorer helps visualize and analyze the British Grand Tour to Italy in new ways, it also exemplifies some of the pitfalls of applying digital tools in the humanities. By mentioning this, I do not intend to diminish the value of such scholarship; rather, I mean to contribute to furthering the ways in which old scholarship and new technologies can interact and such digital projects can truly benefit the humanities.

The Explorer retains many of the cornucopian qualities of its source, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800, compiled from the Brinsley Archive by John Ingamells (1997). The latter was the work of a large editorial team led by Ingamells in order to engage with the vast personal archive of the British collector and art historian Sir Brinsley Ford.²³ The project of amassing the Dictionary was by necessity eclectic, even quixotic, but it produced a unique treasure trove of information regarding the British Grand Tour to Italy in the age of Enlightenment or, perhaps more appropriately, of contemporary British, Irish, and American travel to Italy. British visitors to Italy might or might not have made the list, depending on availability and convenience of materials, not to mention personal interest. They might be blessed with pages of text or relegated to cursory sentences (though the Dictionary identified a very large number of even cursory travelers). Needless to say, the editorial team only recorded itineraries of which they were certain. This led to a number of travelers “teleporting” around Italy as evidenced through fleeting appearances of names and places in archival or published sources. No Grand Tourist could only have visited landlocked Florence in the eighteenth century, no matter how attractive its institutional reforms and relative development were to contemporary travelers.²⁴ It might even be argued that the Dictionary could only be so rich and varied because of what it neglected. As Orlando Pescetti put it in his Proverbi italiani, rendered famous by Voltaire, “the best is the enemy of the good.”²⁵ In this, the Explorer has walked a fine line, maintaining the Dictionary’s original underlying structures, while also making them more transparent and increasing accessibility to its rich content.

Ford, Ingamells, and their collaborators did not plan on their work being transformed into an easily accessible database. This is clear when considering, for example, the defining terms with which many of the Dictionary’s entries begin, which the Explorer has organized in the category of “Employments and Identifiers.” Perhaps only a lone British “editor of Shakespeare” and a solitary “bear leader” really ventured to Italian shores in the eighteenth century—though if one were to substitute “bear leader” with the term tutor or traveling tutor, the number swells to four—but it is hard to believe that only one solitary traveler was a “dilettante poet,” one an “amateur scientist,” and only one, rather implausibly, warranted the qualifier “miscreant.”²⁶ Ingamells cared first and foremost (one is tempted to say singularly) about what Ford had called “matters connected with the arts, patronage [and] collecting,” yet he called only one lonely voyager an “art critic”; boding poorly for subjects he cared for not at all.²⁷ Similarly, though focusing on British travelers, even for the period following the War of Independence (1775–83), he continued to list several Americans. And can we really be certain that William Bosville (1745–1813, travel year 1779) was the British Grand Tour’s only “bon vivant” and John Hall Stevenson (1718–85, travel year 1753) its token “hedonist,” rather than the other way around?²⁸ The Explorer illustrates how the Dictionary’s categories were literary in many cases rather than simply analytical. It also shows how, in extrapolating data from a different medium, one risks codifying the tentative and impressionistic. Ingamells, after all, wished for the book to be “readable” and—somewhat lethally for an analytical database—to embrace “a certain variety of style.”²⁹ To a scholar of the Grand Tour, the classification of the physician and tour guide Dr. James Hay (d. 1746, travel years 1704–6, 1707–9, 1711–12, 1715, 1718–19, 1720, 1722–23, 1729–34) as “bear leader,” for example, is a witty implicit reference to Pier Leone Ghezzi’s c. 1725 caricature Dr. Hay as Bear-Leader and the colloquial eighteenth-century nickname for a traveling tutor (fig. 1). But it also risks suggesting Hay was touring with actual bears—also an early modern practice—around the ruins of ancient Rome rather than with wealthy British youths.³⁰

Even a cursory engagement with the Dictionary through the Explorer would reveal, as I already hinted, that the authors cared little, if at all, about the “economic” Grand Tour. Its only “economist” was the Irish banker and writer Richard Cantillon (1680–1734, travel years 1724–25); its “political economist” was Adam Smith’s nemesis Sir James Steuart (1712–80, travel years 1739, 1758); the lone “agricultural writer” Ingamells detected was Jethro Tull (1674–1741, travel years c. 1711–14); and his “agriculturist” was Arthur Young (1741–1820, travel year 1789).³¹John Symonds (1730–1807, travel years 1765–71), Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge for nearly four decades, was the only tourist identified as an “agronomist, and miscellaneous writer” in the Dictionary, though not as a “historian” or, for that matter, a “lawyer,” which he also was.³² The Welsh Major-General Henry Lloyd, one of the most Münchausen-like figures of his century, appeared both as “soldier and economist Henry Humfrey [sic] Evans” in Parma in 1769, and as the “mercenary, military historian” Gen. Henry Humphrey Evans Lloyd, who traveled widely through Genoa, Leghorn/Livorno, Milan, Rome, Vaprio d’Adda, and Venice.³³ In the digital version of the Explorer, such redundancies can be swiftly located and resolved: Henry Lloyd’s two entries have been combined into one, for example. Moreover, the Explorer curates and adds new layers of navigation to the Dictionary’s text. The “Occupations & Posts” categories now group the professions and interests of travelers in more searchable forms. Still, as a digital transformation of the original text, the Explorer’s data remains, so far, largely dependent on the information contained in the Dictionary.

Yet, Ford, Ingamells, and their team did take note of merchants, to the extent that the second single largest category in “Employments and Identifiers” after “painter” (165 entries) is “merchant” (157 entries). And if one adds the sundry variations of the term—“textile merchant,” “timber merchant,” “oriental merchant,” and “wine merchant”—as well as other “economic” occupations such as, in “Occupations & Posts,” “banker,” “merchant banker,” “financier,” and, of course, “money lender,” in this case, the notorious John “Jew” King (1753–1823, travel years 1785–1823)—one can create a list of 180 such “economic” Grand Tourists reaching Italy from Britain during the period scrutinized by Ingamells; a similar number, incidentally, results from adding up the categories of “painter” (165), “portrait painter” (8), and “watercolourist” (4).³⁴ Both clusters are, in any case, limited compared to the 6,007 total entries in the Explorer, some of which were cross-referenced variations of names, but sizable in relation to the 914 travelers for whom Ingamells found “Employments and Identifiers,” or even the 2,020 that we end up with if we add those with identified “Occupations & Posts.” Adopting a bird’s-eye view for the occasion, a map of all recorded travels of these individuals reveals a logical pattern.

As a baseline of analysis, most Grand Tourists with an employment identifier, occupation, or post visited Italian cities in the same order that the raw total did: Rome (1,371), distantly trailed by Florence (926) and Venice (812), then Naples (810), Turin (476), Leghorn/Livorno (441), Padua (404), and Genoa (339), then a broad swath of locations from Trieste to Sicily (fig. 2). Many travelers reached Italy through France and the Alps, arriving in Savoy Turin. Genoa and Leghorn/Livorno’s prominent places in the second tier of cities might also reflect geographical necessities of travel at the time (for more on this, see Rachel Midura’s essay). One can only assume that Milan would have ranked higher in an aggregate map of Grand Tourists from northern Europe, and Trieste would be ranked higher in the case of travelers from the East.

Focusing on the subset of 177 “painters,” “portrait painters,” and “watercolourists,” as identified in the “Employers and Identifiers,” changes things somewhat (fig. 3). Unsurprisingly, Rome (158 travelers) remains the premier destination on the Grand Tour, with Florence a distant second (68). These are followed by Naples (63) and Venice (43), closely trailed by Bologna (31) and Parma (27). Only around a third of these travelers voyaged south of Rome and, of these, even fewer outside of Naples, though it is remarkable that more visited Naples than Venice. Though this would require sustained archival work to ascertain, it is tempting to guess that the trips by this subset to many of the smaller cities reflected wishes to visit specific places of beauty or artworks on display. As William Hazlitt so famously, if wrongheadedly, derided his countrymen, “the English abroad turn out of their way to visit every pettifogging, huckstering object that they can see better at home.”³⁵

Turning to the 180 travelers on the “economic” Grand Tour, a similar number of entries now reveals a rather different set of itineraries (fig. 4). The Eternal City has, for the first time, been supplanted as the premier destination by Leghorn/Livorno (98), followed by Naples (45), Venice (34), and Rome (31). Destinations farther south were generally neglected by the itineraries of such “economic” Grand Tourists, who focused squarely on the country’s center and north, with comparably high frequencies of visits to the old economic core of the peninsula from Turin down to Genoa, and through Milan to Venice. Strikingly, these travelers were far less likely to be recorded in smaller cities on the Grand Tour than were artists. The Danish cameralist Peter Christian Schumacher, who explicitly had set out on a Grand Tour to study European practices of political economy, justified his decision not to visit Naples: “it holds so little influence in the European system that it cannot be of particularly dire importance [magtpaaliggende] what system they have.”³⁶

The Grand Tour Explorer, in conjunction with Palladio, amply demonstrates that an “economic” Grand Tour indeed existed and that it differed significantly in its itinerary from the travels of other groups, such as artists.³⁷

Eighteenth-century Italy continued to have purchase not merely in art and culture but also in the spheres of business and political economy, for the peninsula’s relative decline did not remove it from the economic map of Europe. The former city-states of northern Italy continued to play a role in the commerce of the continent throughout the eighteenth century, and Leghorn/Livorno remained an important entrepôt throughout the period, particularly for British interests, owing to the prevalence of the Levant Company. Frequently the first port of call after London for ships heading East, and a “great pivot” for British trade in the Mediterranean, Leghorn/Livorno had long established itself as the main “funnel” for Turkish trade with Britain, France, and the Netherlands.³⁸ Leghorn/Livorno held a unique place among Italian cities in the imagination of the Grand Tour for being clean, modern, and built for the living rather than the dead—a space of bustling trade rather than of towering ruins.³⁹ Far more British merchants and sailors visited Leghorn/Livorno than those identified in the Dictionary, of course (as observed by Simon Macdonald). But it remains interesting that the “Free Port” of Leghorn/Livorno—recently the subject of long-overdue scholarly attention in the English-speaking world—would play such an important role in the more traditional Grand Tour that was the primary focus of the Dictionary.⁴⁰

Henry Lloyd’s version of the Grand Tour was, in many ways, characteristic of this kind of economic travel. Very much confined to the upper half of the Italian peninsula, his journeys were dictated by his career as an international spy and economic theorist, as well as by his friendship with members of the Milanese “Academy of Fisticuffs” (Accademia dei pugni), with whom he revolutionized the use of algebra and differential calculus in political economy (fig. 5).⁴¹ Lloyd traveled for reasons of international power politics and to learn about the science and discipline of political economy—itself repeatedly declared emblematic of the Enlightenment as such.⁴²

For an example of a more specifically mercantile-political sojourn, that of Sir Lambert Blackwell (1665–1727, travel years 1689–1705)—merchant and Britain’s first consul to Leghorn/Livorno; later ambassador to Venice, Florence, and Genoa; and director of the South Sea Company—is representative, as his political appointments closely mirrored British strategic and commercial interests on the peninsula. Though hardly evocative of the Grand Tour as commonly understood, Ingamells’ fleeting and melancholy mention of Lewis Blaquiere (1722–54, travel years 1744–54) is also illustrative of countless other British merchants who escaped mention in the Dictionary: “BLAQUIERE, LEWIS (c. 1722–54), merchant. -1744–54 Leghorn. With several other members of the British Factory at Leghorn, he signed a memorial in May 1744. He was presumably the Lewis Blaquiere who died in Leghorn on 3 August 1754, aged 32, and who was buried in the Protestant cemetery.”⁴³

Blaquiere came to Leghorn/Livorno on business and died there a decade later. Predictably, the map of Blaquiere’s Grand Tour matches perfectly those of a number of alphabetized “merchant” entries in the Dictionary, all the way down to Francis Wyatt (travel year 1704), and presumably numerous others.⁴⁴ But, to quote my old friend US Customs and Border Protection Declaration Form 6059B, “Was the primary purpose of this trip business?”⁴⁵ How relevant to the institution of the Grand Tour is Blaquiere’s resounding “yes” to this question? In the case of Jefferson, his travels were clearly driven by purposes of both business and pleasure, and the idea of an “Economic Grand Tour” thus makes a certain degree of sense, but Blaquiere?

Accepting John Brewer’s basic ideal of the Grand Tour as “an educational rite of passage,” often in preparation of “public duties,” an employee on the job abroad such as Blaquiere may actually have had more in common with his contemporary milordi Inglesi than one might first think.⁴⁶ For there existed a venerable European tradition of merchants and tradesmen undergoing similar rites of passage on the road to acquire status in their professions. The British merchant stationed in Leghorn/Livorno might not ultimately have been that different from a prerevolutionary French journeyman, a stereotypical Hanseatic apprentice stuck in Bergen for a decade before returning home to a more important desk job, or, for that matter, a noble Christ Church graduate preparing for a position in British government.⁴⁷ Inflections of this practice—quintessentially evident even in the aforementioned Aboriginal walkabout—continue to characterize modern business and government institutions alike in large parts of the world.

If we focus instead on the subset of thirty-seven Grand Tourists in the “Occupations & Posts” category of “Finance and Trade,” the resulting map presents a different picture (fig. 6). This subset includes the sort of powerful economic actors whom contemporaries began to call “capitalists,” such as David Digues La Touche (1729–1817, travel years 1753–54, 1781, 1787–93), the first governor of the Bank of Ireland. Among these tourists, Rome (19 travelers) reclaims its throne, followed by Venice (15), Florence (14), and Leghorn/Livorno (11). Not surprisingly, those who did venture South of Italy’s financial centers did so for the reason one might expect from historiography. La Touche, for example, seemingly traveled to Capua and Naples as a “collector,” rather than on business.⁴⁸

Turning to the larger occupational subset of “Statesmen and Political Appointees” (884), the resulting map is in turn more reminiscent of the pattern revealed by the overall Explorer data (fig. 7). It seems improbable that only one of these travelers visited Pompeii, but, generally speaking, these numbers highlight the degree to which recent scholarship has exaggerated the importance of Naples relative to northern Italian cities as a destination for British travelers and even more egregiously that of the rest of southern Italy(fig. 8). It remains striking that, at the time of this writing, the search for “eighteenth-century Naples” has 574 hits on Google Scholar, vastly overshadowing the equivalent searches for Florence (234), Genoa (52), Milan (178), Livorno (117; Leghorn has 2), and Turin (221), though all are dwarfed by Venice (1,450) and particularly Rome (1,990). A more specific search for “Grand Tour” in conjunction with the names of various cities is less informative, simply because most works on the Grand Tour mention a host of names somewhere in their texts, but the difference between Naples (8,580) and Leghorn/Livorno (973) still serves to illustrate the divergence between historical travel and historiographical emphasis.⁴⁹

City	Number of “Finance and Trade”	Number of “Statesmen and Political Appointees”	Overall number of travelers
Rome	19	663	3367
Florence	14	475	2136
Venice	15	429	2135
Naples	4	412	1931
Padua	8	230	1148
Leghorn	11	140	969
Turin	3	280	949
Bologna	2	163	665
Genoa	3	180	613
Milan	3	166	588

Though far from a perfect proxy for general cultural interest, a Google Ngram of the names of Italian cities in English publications of the eighteenth century can throw light on the problem from a complementary perspective (figs. 9 and 10).⁵⁰ Rome naturally remains by far the most frequently mentioned Italian city throughout the century, because it was the seat of the papacy, capital of the greatest empire in world history, and, to many, the fountainhead of Western civilization.⁵¹ The other, less-myth-spun cities enjoyed shifting fortunes, with Naples seeing two peaks of interest around 1730 and 1760, along with a resurgence of mentions of most other major Italian cities. In the eighteenth century, English books mentioned Naples more frequently than English travelers actually visited the city, based on the Explorer, particularly in comparison to other cities. Leghorn/Livorno was more important to English trade and travel than the aggregate book history as channeled by a Google Ngram would suggest. If nothing else, these different perspectives on the Grand Tour made possible by digital history suggest more expansive approaches to different cities than have been traditionally employed.

The Grand Tour Explorer supports the theory that economic travelers to Italy as a whole ventured to different places than those visited by the average traveler identified in the Dictionary, as well as those habitually emphasized by historians of the Grand Tour. Furthermore, it indicates a direction for more extensive archival work to answer the question of why, exactly, economically interested individual British travelers chose particular destinations. Finally, the visualizations made possible by the use of digital tools suggest that significant historiographical revisionism is in order, as the center of gravity for British travelers to Italy matched the centers of economic activity on the peninsula far more closely than recent scholarship would suggest, even, as the aggregate data reveals, in the case of stereotypically aristocratic travelers seeking Bildung through exposure to the material remnants of antiquity.⁵² The Grand Tour was a protean institution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the shifting geography of which reflected changing spaces of cultural importance in Europe.⁵³ Though the Enlightenment fervor for exoticism, antiquarianism, collecting, and bric-a-brac generally has been studied in recent decades, travel was also one of the most important vectors for worldlier processes of international commerce, communication, competition, and emulation at the time. The greatest difference between the traditional scholarly Grand Tour and its economic variation, however, might be that while the former looked to the past, the latter looked resolutely to the future, inventing rather than confirming established tropes.⁵⁴ Journeying for business and political economy remains a vast, transhistorical phenomenon, of which the economic tourism traceable through the Grand Tour Explorer must be considered an important subset and the Grand Tour itself a particularly vibrant chapter in the timeless flow of goods, people, and ideas that forms our past and our present.

Acknowledgements

This essay was prepared as part of Giovanna Cesarani’s Grand Tour Explorer project, and I am grateful to the participants at her Stanford conference of March 4–5, 2016, as well as to Steven L. Kaplan and Robert Fredona for comments.

Notes