The Grand Tour in the 1700s

From a review by Laura Gascoigne on the exhibition Pompeo Batoni 1708–1787 is at the National Gallery.

She deals first with the Grand Tour and the English gentry who were Rome's most visible tourists for a century or so, with an occasional interuption.

‘I was much disappointed in seeing Rome,’ complained the English traveller Sarah Bentham in the 1790s. ‘The streets are narrow, dirty and filthy. Even the palaces are a mixture of dirt and finery and intermixed with wretched mean houses. The largest open spaces in Rome are used for the sale of vegetables...’ The widowed stepmother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham was equally underwhelmed by the Roman Campagna made famous by Claude. The city, she wrote, ‘appeared to be located in a desert’.

Most Grand Tourists were young men — ‘schoolboys just broke loose’, in the words of Horace Walpole — enjoying the equivalent of a post-university gap year under the loose supervision of ‘bearleaders’, some of whom were barely older than their charges. Their priorities, as one might expect, were socialising, drinking, gambling and sex, with cultural improvement relatively low on the list. The French man of letters Charles de Brosses even claimed in 1739 that some left Rome ‘without having seen anyone but other Englishmen and without knowing where the Colosseum is’. He was exaggerating about the Colosseum, but he was right about the company. In 1766 the young Marquess of Kildare reported chirpily to his mother that he had run into more than 40 Old Etonian chums in the space of nine months. Few British visitors to Rome, other than the odd Catholic, consorted with Italians. Edward Thomas spoke for many in 1750 when he expressed the fervent wish that he could have seen ‘Rome in its ancient splendour and adorned with her heroes, instead of the D***ls incarnate she is now generally replenished with’.

The English have always been desperate for some home grub, but even now those

hankering after ‘boiled leg of pork, and peas-pudding’, like the 18th-century Dorset gentleman Peter Beckford, will have to settle for zampóne and lentils. But Babington’s Tea Rooms still brews a peerless cuppa, and the Hotel d’Inghilterra in Via Bocca di Leone offers James Bond cocktails in a gentleman’s club bar.

[The] ‘English Ghetto’ [was] around the Piazza di Spagna.

Pompeo Batoni (1708–87) painted portraits of English gentlemen on the Grand Tour. They were a sort of personalised souvenir that made the gentlemen look more stylish than they were and placed them among the classical sites that were supposed to be the highlights of the journey. In the 1770s, Batoni charged 20 guineas for a half-length, which was "expensive by Italian standards but cheaper than Reynolds, and compared favourably with the cost of a course on Roman antiquities by the Scottish cicerone James Byres, which took six weeks and was famously hard work".

The Gardens of the Villa Borghese

The wooded and flowery lawns are more beautiful than the finest of English park-scenery, more touching, more impressive, through the neglect that leaves Nature so much to her own ways and methods. Since man seldom interferes with her, she sets to work in her quiet way, and makes herself at home. There is enough of human care, it is true, bestowed long ago, and still bestowed, to prevent wildness from growing into deformity; and the result is an ideal landscape, a woodland scene, that seems to have been projected out of a poet's mind. If the ancient faun were other than a mere creation of old poetry, and could have re-appeared anywhere, it must have been in such a scene as this.

In the openings of the woods, there are fountains plashing into marble basins, the depths of which are shaggy with water-weeds; or they tumble like natural cascades from rock to rock, sending their murmur afar, to make the quiet and silence more appreciable. Scattered here and there, with careless artifice, stand old altars, bearing Roman inscriptions. Statues, gray with the long corrosion of even that soft atmosphere, half hide and half reveal themsleves, high on pedestals, or perhaps fallen and broken on the turf. Terminal figures, columns of marble or granite, porticoes, arches, are seen in the vistas of the wood-paths, either veritable relics of antiquity, or with so exquisite a touch of artful ruin on them, that they are better than if really antique. At all events, grass grows on the tops of the shattered pillars, and weeds and flowers root themselves in the chinks of the massive arches and fronts of temples, and clamber at large over their pediments, as if this were the thousandth summer since their winged steeds alighted there. What a strange idea - what a needless labour - to construct artificial ruins in Rome, the native soil of Ruin! But even these sportive imitations, wrought by man in emulation of what Time has done to temples and palaces, are perhaps centuries old, and, beginning as illusions, have grown to be venerable in sober earnest. The result of all is a scene, pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable, and sad, such as is to be found nowhere save in these princely villa-residences, in the neighbourhood of Rome; a scene that must have required generations and ages, during which growth, decay, and man's intelligence, wrought kindly together, to render it so gently wild as we behold it now.

The final charm is bestowed by the Malaria. There is a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown away, or only enjoyed at its half-development, in winter and early spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home-scenery for any human being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades in the golden sunset, Fever walks arm in arm with you, and Death awaits you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond the scope of man's actual possessions.
The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorn (1860), Chapter VIII, 'The Suburban Villa'

...and Ruin to make them grow

Italy, as the site of his romance, was chiefly valuable to him [Hawthorne] as according a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America...Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens and wall-flowers, need Ruin to make them grow.
The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorn (published in 1860, based on notes made in 1857-59), Preface

Artist's vision

Artists could gather in Rome and feel at home - that is, they were not doing anything that seemed to contradict either common sense or the utilitarian puritanism of industrial man. And there were many.

The aesthetics of Garibaldi must have appealed and to some must have occurred the notion, unthinkable to the many, that he might sweep away the millennial power of the Vatican - that what had nurtured countless lives, inspired the greatest art, drawn to a climax the most adrenaline-driven spiritual climbers, could be brought down in a day. The drama and pathos of that possibility would have been intoxicating to those who were capable of conceiving it.

Like Stockhausen and 9/11.

View over the Forum

From one of the windows of this saloon [in the Capitoline Museum], we may see a flight of broad stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimus Severus, right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum, (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun,) passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled rudely up with ancient brick and stone, and over the domes of Christian churches, built on the old pavements of heathen temples, and supported by the very pillars that once upheld them. At a distance beyond - yet but a little way, considering how much history is heaped into the intervening space - rises the great sweep of the Coliseum, with the blue sky brightening through its upper tier of arches. Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban mountains, looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall.
The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorn (published in 1860, based on notes made in 1857-59), Chapter 1