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