My interest in the Grand Tour explorer arises out of my own work on the engagement of British travelers with Italian cities during the long eighteenth century. Some years ago, I published a book that concentrated upon 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 considering their influence in British culture. Given the opportunity to work with the Grand Tour Explorer, I wanted to use it to pursue several questions.</p>

Like many historians, years of immersion in the primary sources meant that I had an intuitive sense of evolving patterns of travel and the composition of the traveling body. However, 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 (see the introduction of the book)? 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 such a powerful influence upon 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life through patronage of artists and architects.2 But it was also clear from my own research in both published and unpublished sources that traveling alongside such young men were a diverse range of other individuals, whose recorded experience had become subsumed within that of an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 throughout my book was the increasing presence of both female travelers and travelers from beyond the landed elite over the course of the eighteenth century, 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 both on the dominance exercised by these cities in the Grand Tour as an institution, and the significance of other centers with a lower profile: such as Turin, Bologna, Milan, Padua, Genoa and Leghorn.