Writers of the Grand Tour
Eighteenth Century
Travel to Italy and Literature
• Travel to Italy generates a great literary
production
• Iinitially Travel journals, memoirs,
autobiographies, authentic or ficitional
correspondence,
• Guidebooks
– Guidebooks for travellers with practical information
(hotels, restaurants) from the middle of Nineteenth
century with the rise of mass tourism (in England
Murray’s 1837, in Germany Baedecker 1836).
• Novels with travel plots. Gothic romances. Poetry
about visit to Italy(Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley)
• Art guides on paintings, sculptures, architecture,
music, drama
Tourists of the Enlightenment: Addison
• Joseph Addison (1672–1719), who wrote of his travels on the
Grand Tour in The Voyage of Italy, published in 1705.
• Written in a far more familiar travel diary style than the
Coryate book of 1611, Addison reveals the enlightened,
eighteenth-century view.
• On the Grand Tour a tutor, known as the “bearleader,”
accompanied young gents and acted as both guide and tutor.
Addison was the bearleader for two such young English lords,
George Dashwood and Edward Wortley Montague.
• Among his observations in The Voyage of Italy is that in Rome
“there are more statues in it than there are men in most other
cities....”
Most prominent “narrators” of the
eighteenth-century Grand Tour
JOSEPH ADDISON
(1672-1719)
Remarks on Several Parts
of Italy (1705)
Italy: a museum of classical
antiquities (repetitive
catalogue)
Addison as a commentator
on classics?
Samuel Sharp
• Samuel Sharp travelled to Italy in 1765– 1766 and
was so disgruntled with the trip that he wrote a
book condemning almost all things Italian:
• “The kitchen tables were filthy, the wine was bad
… the streets swarmed with monks, beggars, and
bedraggled paupers; cooks, postillions, and
innkeepers were incompetent extortioners, and
even the climate was insupportable.…”
SAMUEL SHARP
(1700?-1778)
Letters from Italy, describing the
Customs and Manners of that
Country (1766)
Critical account of the manners
and customs of Italians
TOBIAS SMOLLETT
(1721-1771)
Travels through France
and Italy (1766)
Sharp account of Italians
While in Italy, Smollett
met Laurence Sterne who
in turn satirized his
attitude towards Italian
customs and manners in
the character of
Smelfungus in his
Sentimental Journey
(1768)
A response to Sharp and Smollett:
Giuseppe Baretti
GIUSEPPE BARETTI
(1719-1789)
An Account of the Manners
and Customs of Italy (1768)
Resident in London and
teacher of Italian language
and literature at Streatham
Park (Thrales and Johnson)
Staunch defender of
Italianness
LADY MARY
WORTLEY
MONTAGU
(1689-1762)
Letters (1765)
Aristocratic intellectual
Famous for her Turkish
Letters (1764) and
inoculation
Two different
experiences of Italy (as
a wife and as a lover)
HESTER LYNCH
THRALE PIOZZI
(1763-1852)
Observations and
Reflections Made in
the Course of a
Journey through
France, Italy, and
Germany (1789)
“looking for pleasure
beyond the limits of
innocence”
GOETHE
• One of the most important, enthusiastic, and
influential of the early Grand Tourists to Rome was not
English but German. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749– 1832) travelled to Italy in 1786 and later wrote
in his Italienische Reise:
• “Were I not impelled by the German spirit and desire
to learn and do rather than admire, I would stay on …
in this school of light hearted and happy life....”
• Goethe still fondly remembered this “light hearted and
happy life” in Rome in his 1789 book on the Roman
Carnival.
Goethe nella Campagna romana con rovine
romane
Quali modelli per la Cina?