My interest in the Grand Tour Explorer arises out of my own work on the engagement of British travelers with Italian cities. Some years ago, I published a book that concentrated on British experiences and representations of Italian cities during the long eighteenth century, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690–1820.¹ As an urban historian, I was less concerned with what was collected or purchased by travelers, or with their social networks, than with exploring how images of major Italian cities were constructed and how they influenced British culture. Given the opportunity to work with the Grand Tour Explorer, I sought to pursue several questions.

Like many historians, my years of immersion in the primary sources had given me an intuitive sense of evolving patterns of travel and the composition of the traveling body. But I was unable to provide any rigorous quantifiable basis for my conclusions or generalizations. How far were my generalizations borne out by the evidence of the Explorer, while taking into account the complex nature of its data, which we know to be far from complete? What new light could the Explorer cast on my own qualitative and more impressionistic research by providing more granular and accurate snapshots of topics such as itineraries, numbers of travelers, or duration of stay? What could the Explorer tell us about the changing social composition of tourists, shifts in the gender ratio, and patterns in the age cohort of the traveling body?

The dominant paradigm of the Grand Tour is that of the aristocratic young man, sent to Italy to finish his education and to prepare him socially for a life of political and cultural leadership, whose taste—acquired and polished in Italy—exercised a powerful influence on Britain’s eighteenth-century cultural life through patronage of artists and architects.² But it was also clear from my own research in both published and unpublished sources that traveling alongside such young men were a diverse range of other individuals, whose recorded experience had become subsumed within that of an archetypal aristocratic Grand Tourist. One of the themes that I had tried to draw out in my book was the increasing presence over the course of the eighteenth century both of female travelers and of travelers from beyond the landed elite, and the Explorer provided the opportunity to test this thesis. Finally, because I had focused very heavily on the four major cities of the Italia tour in my book—Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice—I was interested to see what light the Explorer might cast on the dominance exercised by these cities in the Grand Tour as an institution and on the significance of other centers with a lower profile, such as Turin, Bologna, Milan, Padua, Genoa, and Leghorn/Livorno.

My initial approach was very basic: looking at patterns of travel and the relative popularity (in terms of numbers of visitors rather than length of stay) of individual cities. Figures 1 and 2 show the number of travelers to individual cities by decade: figure 1 shows the five most popular cities; figure 2 shows the ten most popular cities.

The data helps to clarify what most of us who have studied the Grand Tour without engaging in any quantitative analysis knew anyway: that travel declined in times of war—most strikingly in the 1740s, during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48), and to a lesser extent during the American War of Independence (1775–83); that Naples was increasingly popular as a destination in the latter half of the century; and that Rome was the most frequented city by a large margin. The data also confirms that numbers of travelers increased significantly after the Peace of Paris (1763) and that travel did not immediately stop after the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789). Beyond the main four cities (and initially Padua), cities such as Bologna, Genoa, and Milan showed more or less the same pattern: a small but steady increase in numbers, particularly after 1760, until a stabilization or decline at the very end of the century. Although new areas were added to the tour of Italy—notably south of Naples in the late eighteenth century—Padua was the only destination that saw a clear decline in significance in the itineraries of British travelers over the course of the eighteenth century.

The dominance of Naples over Florence in the last two decades of the century is a striking feature. Again, one might have inferred this from the comments of visitors in journals, letters, and topographical literature: enthusiasm for Naples and the warm south increased as anxiety about its dangers and licentiousness diminished, whereas the charms of Florence were felt more keenly earlier in the century. Meanwhile, the rediscovery of medieval and early Renaissance Florence—the version of the city that would so charm the Victorians—had yet to be made.³ Similarly, although Venice was always one of the most important destinations of the Italian tour, the data suggests that it was overtaken in popularity by Florence and Naples during the second half of the century until the last decade. There are a number of reasons why this might have been the case: first, and most pragmatically, while both Florence and Naples were centers where British tourists were happy to reside for weeks or even months, Venice was a city through which visitors passed much more swiftly, seldom spending more than a week or two. There is therefore a higher chance that visits went unrecorded. The relative downward trend in Venice’s appeal is borne out by more qualitative comments, the tenor of which showed increasing awareness of Venice’s decline and a greater inclination to find fault with the city’s appearance, its society, and its virtue. In the 1790s, however, when visitor numbers in other cities were falling, numbers in Venice (and to a lesser extent to Padua) increased: a shift that reflects the geopolitics of the time as travelers were funneled out of Italy through the Austrian Tyrol rather than through enemy France.⁴

The most striking point, however, is the dominance of Padua in the early eighteenth century. Indeed, during the first decade of the eighteenth century we know of more travelers in Padua than in any other city, Rome included. In the second decade, the number was equal to those in Rome; by the third decade, Padua appears to have been losing its dominance; and by midcentury, it had become, apparently, a relatively unimportant destination on the British Grand Tour. In general terms, this broad outline bears out what we know already: the reputation of Padua’s medieval university was in decline during the eighteenth century; it was not a contemporary hub of major artistic or cultural production, nor was it a political or religious center.

Beyond that, this data highlights one of the problems with the archival base of A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800, compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive by John Ingamells (1997), which is carried over in the Explorer.⁵ A key source for the compilers of the Dictionary was the register of matriculation at the University in Padua, which visitors in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made a point of signing.⁶ As Ingamells explained in his introduction to the Dictionary, this source allowed the compilers of the Dictionary to document visitors passing through Padua early in the century more completely than for most other cities. But the declining numbers that we see from the 1730s also correspond with a decline in the practice of signing the register: the last signature was recorded in 1765.⁷ This does not mean that visitors were no longer passing through the city; it simply shows that there was no longer a single source of evidence to verify their presence. Thus, the reliability of the Dictionary in noting visits to lesser cities is, unsurprisingly, less consistent.

This point, of course, applies to any city where visitors spent days rather than weeks, and it reflects the interests of those compiling the Dictionary, whose agenda was the history of art and collecting, as well as the examination of the social networks of those who were engaged in shaping taste and exercising patronage. The experience of travel per se was not their driving concern. For example, the visit to Padua by the Norwich merchant Robert Harvey (1753–1820, travel year 1773) was undocumented in the Dictionary; however, his journal records that he became stuck in the mud outside Padua and spent the following day wandering around “this large, straggling, ill built, ancient city with arcades said to have been built by Antenor, whose tomb they pretend to show you.”⁸ Yet the Dictionary entry has him proceeding from Rome to Venice, in common with many other entries, with no mention of any of the intervening cities.

Numbers of visitors to all cities increased in the 1760s, but the spike for Turin is particularly noticeable; moreover, the increase was not sustained subsequently, whereas in other cities numbers of visitors continued on an upward trend. The pattern becomes clearer if we look at Turin in isolation (fig. 3).

Turin’s geographical situation ensured its importance as a center for travelers, being the first major city for those who approached Italy via the Mt. Cenis Pass. Travelers conventionally stayed there for at least a couple of days, if not longer, to recover from the rigors of the journey and admire the view of the mountains they had so recently traversed. As the “bear leader,” Joseph Spence (1699–1768, years of travel 1731–33, and 1739–41), informed his mother: “The view we have from the ramparts is the prettiest and the most extraordinary I ever saw in my life, for on one side you see the Alps, rugged and all covered with snow, and on the other the most beautiful hills sprinkled with little country seats, vineyards, fine clumps of wood, and the Po, running at the bottom of them.”⁹ The presence of the court, reckoned by Spence “one of the politest in Europe,”¹⁰ was always an attraction, as were the royal art collections, the university, and the formal symmetry, regularity, and monumentality of the new town. The dramatic surge in visitors in the 1760s is therefore somewhat puzzling.

The spike in visitors might well reflect the vagaries of the evidence compiled for the Dictionary and the idiosyncrasies of principles for inclusion, but it could also be occasioned by shifts in Alpine travel, as discussed by Rachel Midura. One further reason for the attraction of Turin to British visitors is worth consideration: the Royal Academy (Reale Accademia di Savoia), reorganized by the king of Sardinia in 1729 for the education of the European elite and a key destination for many of the aristocratic youth, who stayed there for months at a time with their tutors. Young elite men attended the Accademia (and other similar academies throughout Europe) to perfect physical skills such as horsemanship, fencing, or dancing and to be taught subjects such as fortifications and mathematics.¹¹

Young men and foreigners, advised Thomas Martyn (1735–1825, travel years 1779–80), could be trained there at moderate expense because the king defrayed part of the cost.¹² The value for money emphasized by Martyn may not have been the deciding factor for aristocratic parents like the 10th Earl of Pembroke Henry Herbert (1734–92, travel years 1753–55, 1768–69, 1784–86, 1789), who hoped rather that his “tall, lank and bony” offspring George Augustus Herbert, 11th Earl of Pembroke (1759–1827, travel years 1779–80), would benefit from “some attention to person, & Grace” at the Accademia.¹³

Analyzing visitor numbers by age indicates that, of the visitors that are known to have visited Turin, more youths were recorded here than in other cities, such as Rome. Using their birth dates, I identified the number of travelers per decade who were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five at time of travel.¹⁴ This is an approximate exercise given that only around 41 percent of the entries have confirmed birth dates (fig. 5). It is likely, however, that the majority of those whose birth dates are recorded would have been members of the aristocratic elite whose lives in general are so much better documented. The peaks in terms of the presence of travelers in Turin designated as “youths” based on this criteria can be related to those identified by Paola Bianchi in terms of attendance at the Accademia by British noblemen and their tutors.¹⁵ Bianchi’s data shows that the Accademia was at its most popular among the British aristocratic elite during the period 1745 to 1765, a pattern that calls for comparison with what the Explorer data shows (fig. 4).¹⁶

Years	Number of British
1733	3
1736-40	15
1741-45	16
1746-50	35
1751-55	14
1756-60	30
1761-65	21
1766-70	19
1771-75	13
1776-79	11
1784-85	3
1786-90	4

The usual caveat regarding the inherent aristocratic bias of the Dictionary applies: the elite young men who attended the Accademia are precisely those whose travels are recorded in most detail. Moreover, their presence in Turin was the more noticeable because as students of the Accademia they generally spent a period of months rather than days or weeks in the city, in contrast to the travelers who stayed only a couple of days before moving onward.

The number of these “classic” Grand Tourists (meaning elite, young men) recorded in Turin can therefore be approached as reasonably accurate. Yet it should be noted that Bianchi’s data, drawn from the records of attendees at the Accademia in the Treasury archives of Turin, includes eighty names of young men, their companions, and their tutors, whose presence in Turin is not recorded in the Dictionary. In any case—and possibly also because of the different divisions of time in Bianchi (five-year versus ten-year intervals)—there is not an exact match in peak numbers between the Explorer’s data and that of Bianchi.¹⁷

Decade	Travelers to Italy (Known Birth Date)	Percentage of Whom Were Young Men	Travelers to Turin	Percentage of Whom Were Young Men	Travelers to Rome	Percentage of Whom Were Young Men
1701-10	170	60.59	35	40.00	181	32.04
1711-20	194	45.36	74	29.73	243	23.87
1721-30	223	43.50	50	24.00	425	18.82
1731-40	280	48.57	123	40.65	395	22.28
1741-50	215	42.79	50	36.00	191	27.75
1751-60	278	46.40	91	45.05	333	28.53
1761-70	382	46.86	245	27.35	454	25.33
1771-80	401	35.41	123	20.33	550	18.18
1781-90	353	31.44	140	18.57	566	13.25
1791-1800	284	30.28	86	17.44	463	14.04

Consideration of the age profile of travelers across the period and across the different cities confirms the model identified by John Towner, based on his survey of approximately two hundred examples of published travel literature. Towner argued that the high point of the typical Grand Tour was in the mid-eighteenth century and began to tail off thereafter as other types of travelers (Towner’s “middle classes”) increased.¹⁸ The detailed picture offered by the Explorer data is rather more interesting. The numbers—particularly in Rome and Naples, two of the most popular cities for which most information survives—continued to be higher than in the earlier part of the century. That said, as a proportion of the total number of travelers, the young men were becoming less significant. Meanwhile, a snapshot of those whom we know to have been “middle-aged” (i.e., between forty and fifty) shows that their numbers per decade roughly doubled over the course of the century (fig. 6).

Decade	Total Number of Travelers (Known Birth Date)	Number of Middle-Aged Men	Middle-Aged Men \%
1701-10	170	15	8.82
1711-20	194	25	12.89
1721-30	223	28	12.56
1731-40	280	38	13.57
1741-50	215	25	11.63
1751-60	278	27	9.71
1761-70	382	53	13.87
1771-80	401	58	14.46
1781-90	353	61	17.28
1791-1800	284	55	19.37

One of the great achievements of the Explorer is to have identified the many “hidden” women, buried in the Dictionary, for whom the compilers never thought to devote an entry in their own right. When mentioned, women were generally overshadowed by their male traveling companions: even Harriet Carr (1771–1848, travel years 1791–94), the amateur artist and traveling companion of her brother, John Carr (1764–1817, travel years 1791–94), on whose journals most of the article on her brother’s travels was based, merited only a minimal entry in the Dictionary, yet she now has an entry of her own in the Explorer.¹⁹ The numerous wives, sisters, and daughters (often unnamed) who accompanied other travelers were even harder to detect; a similar problem hindered locating younger brothers and younger sons, servants, and many other unnamed fellow travelers. Many of these individuals have now been extracted from the records and given an entry in their own right in the Explorer. Yet the compilers of the Dictionary never set out comprehensively to record these “lesser” individuals, so despite the best efforts of those involved in the Explorer to overcome the aristocratic male bias, it is impossible to make visible those whose existence is not even mentioned in the Dictionary—a point taken up also by Simon Macdonald.

Although the data will always remain frustratingly incomplete, the general trend illustrated in figure 7 shows a marked increase in female travelers during the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Taken with the increasing numbers of older male travelers, this data helps to provide firmer substance to the generalized assertions of an increasingly diverse traveling community by the last decades of the eighteenth century. The first woman to publish on travel to Italy was Lady Anne Miller (1741–81, travel year 1770–71), whose Letters from Italy appeared, to a mixed reception from the public, in 1776.²⁰ Notwithstanding some stinging criticism from Horace Walpole (1717–97, travel years 1739–41) and others, Lady Miller’s Letters enjoyed considerable popularity; subsequently, other female travelers, such as Hester Thrale Piozzi (1741–1821, travel years 1784–86) and Mariana Starke (c. 1762–1839, travel years 1792–98), followed suit in publishing their own observations.²¹ The increasing numbers of female travelers and travel writers in the later eighteenth century—domestically, in Europe, and further afield—has rightly attracted recent scholarly attention.²² But it is also important to acknowledge the presence of women before the 1770s, now revealed by the Explorer, and to be mindful that not all of them were the long-term resident wives of diplomats or merchants. These underrecorded women may not have engaged in the traditional pedagogic program of the Grand Tour or shared in all the cultural experiences that are traditionally held to have defined it, but they were in Italy, experiencing all the differences of cultural and social life that that implies, enduring the physical hardship and discomfort of foreign travel and contributing to and sharing in the experiences of their male companions.

Considering together the age profile and the numbers of women traveling—flawed though the data necessarily is—what patterns emerge? Figure 8 compares the number of female travelers against the number of male youth and men of middle age and of unspecified age. The most striking point to emerge is that from the 1770s, the numbers of women rivaled those of young men traveling in Italy. As I have already noted, the data, particularly with regard to ages, is incomplete, but it does demonstrate the degree to which patterns of travel had changed by the last two decades of the century. The Grand Tour was increasingly being undertaken by families and groups of mixed ages and genders, whose presence comes across clearly in the more qualitative evidence of journals and correspondence.

The changing social profile of travelers was also one of social background and class. This is harder to pursue through the Explorer, again owing to the limited data for the nonaristocratic elite. The largest single “Occupations & Posts Group” category on the Grand Tour Explorer is that of statesman or politician (884 individuals) followed by the army and navy (291 individuals), confirming the image of the Grand Tour as the training ground of the future social, political, and military elite. That said, the statesmen and politicians were precisely those people whose careers are easiest for historians to trace. Only 1,486 of the individuals in the Dictionary were assigned explicit occupations and posts, leaving the majority (4,486) without. The “Employment and Identifier” category offers another approach, but with its own caveats.

Two natural subsets for considering the “nonelite” traveler might be the clergy and merchants; however, they are each difficult to consider independently from other Grand Tourists for different reasons. Aristocratic young men were almost always accompanied by tutors who were very often members of the clergy, such as the Reverend Joseph Spence (1699–1768, travel years 1731–33, 1739–41), whose comments on Turin—from two separate tours that he made in the company of, respectively, the Earl of Middlesex (1711–69, travel years 1731–33, 1736–38) and the Earl of Lincoln (1720–94, travel years 1739–41)—have already been quoted. Merchants are a reasonably numerous category to consider (157 individuals are identified as merchants), but the results of this exercise are skewed by the inclusion of long-term residents in the Dictionary, such as the merchants from the English factory at Leghorn/Livorno, who are discussed in the essays by Reinert and Macdonald. A number of merchants from Britain did travel, sometimes using the occasion to visit foreign business partners as the opportunity to partake of the wider cultural experience offered by Italy; however, merchants were much more likely to be semipermanent residents of various Italian ports.²³ Similarly, there was a preponderance of clergy in Rome, which reflects the centrality of Rome to the tour. But for the clergy more than for any other group, Rome would have been a particularly significant destination, given that most clergymen would have enjoyed a rigorously classical education and many had a professional interest in the history of the Christian church. While these groups often had professional ties to the Grand Tour, they complicate our idea of a “traveler” on tour.

It is, in fact, relatively difficult to use the Explorer to investigate the social backgrounds of travelers from beyond the landed elite. This is due to the limitations of the information in the original Dictionary, the inconsistency with which it was recorded by the compilers (for whom documenting social change within the traveling community was not a primary concern), and the blurred lines within British society that separated members of the landed, professional, and mercantile classes. Towner’s assertion of higher levels of middle-class participation is perhaps more emphatic than the data of the Explorer suggests; while there is an inherent aristocratic bias in the Explorer, Towner’s methodology of analyzing published tours similarly has an inbuilt bias toward the middle classes, who were far more likely than the aristocracy and landed elite to enter into print.²⁴

One of the great pleasures of using the Dictionary is discovering the wealth of extraordinarily diverse information that it records within the limits of multiple biographical entries, which cumulatively constitute a uniquely detailed history of eighteenth-century travel. In its print version, it is unwieldy to use systematically (although a number of researchers claim to have read it cover to cover). The Explorer, however, makes this information fully discoverable for the first time: as this essay has attempted to show, evolving itineraries or the changing composition of the traveling community by age and gender can be delineated with a far greater degree of confidence than is possible simply through more qualitative analysis. The shortcomings of the data, however, discussed in the introduction, must always render the conclusions provisional: as this essay has also shown, the questions that researchers may ask of the data are not necessarily those that the compilers had in mind when writing the entries, and this has a bearing on the results that the Explorer generates. Nonetheless, the Explorer makes it possible to establish with far greater confidence than ever before who was traveling where and when, providing thereby the framework around which a much more nuanced history of the experience of travel in Italy may be written.

Notes