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 Rome Effect

It is rarely indifference. Nineteenth Century travellers were, more often than not, classically educated, religiously motivated and politically committed. They went to Rome with strong expectations and usually found much to feed their passion or their indignation. They could also have fun.

I sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion, and I had a little French painter, a young academician, always vain, always alert, always gay, who served as my jackal. I remembered the rakish deeds of Horace and other amorous Roman poets, and I thought that one might well allow oneself a little indulgence in a city where there are prostitutes licensed by the Cardinal Vicar. [James Boswell]

[A]ll that I had been acquainted with through paintings or drawings, engravings or woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models are here collectively presented to my eye. [I]t is all just as I had thought it, but it is all new...[I am attracted to Rome by a] irresistible impulse, indeed for the past few years it has become with me a kind of desease which could only be cured by the sight and presence of the absent object' [Goethe]

I had no idea that an excitement so powerful and agreeable still untried by me was to be found in the world. [Macauley]

[Rome's] enchanted sky, so pure that a sigh rises to God more freely than in any other place on earth. [Alfred de Musset]

[Italy was] mostly an emotion. The month of May, 1860, was divine...The shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. [Henry Adams]

Then there was the other side. First, the romance of decay and then its horror.

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 enjoyable 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. [Nathaniel Hawthorne]

[T]here is a strange horror lying over the whole city, which I can neither describe nor account for; it is a shadow of death, possessing and penetrating all things. The sunlight is lurid and ghastly...the shadows are cold and sepulchral; you feel like an artist in a fever, haunted by every dream of beauty that his imagination has ever dwelt upon, but all mixed with the fever fear. I am sure this is not imagination, for I am not given to such nonsense. and even in illness never remember feeling anything approaching to the horror with which some object here can affect me. [Ruskin]

I collected these quotes from Pick, Daniel (2005), Rome or Death.