The Grand Tour
For three centuries the finishing journey of European education ran from Paris to Naples by way of the great courts and ruins. This collection retraces it at the modern traveller's pace — same marble, better rooms.
For roughly two centuries, from the 1660s until the railway ended it, a young northern European of means was expected to finish his education by going south. The Grand Tour was not a holiday but a curriculum — eighteen months to four years, usually with a tutor, in which the student acquired languages, manners, an eye for antiquity and, the part nobody wrote down, a stock of anecdotes that would place him for life.
The route was fixed to a degree that surprises people now. Paris first, for the language and a dancing master; then Lyon and Geneva, then over the Alps, which every eighteenth-century traveller described as an ordeal rather than a view — the Romantic taste for mountains had not yet been invented, and Horace Walpole's dog was eaten by a wolf on the crossing. Turin, then the Lombard and Veneto cities: Milan for painting, Padua for the anatomical theatre, Vicenza for Palladio, whose Four Books were the reason half the party had come. Venice for carnival and a reputation. Bologna, Florence, Pisa, Siena. Then Rome for a winter, with a cicerone and a portrait painted against the ruins.
Naples was the newest part of the itinerary. Herculaneum was found in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748, and within a decade no serious Tour omitted them — the excavations changed European taste faster than anything since. The learned went on to Athens. The rest came home through the empire: Salzburg, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, each a stop rather than a destination.
What the Tour sent home mattered more than what it taught. Travellers bought: antiquities by the crate, Canaletto's views of Venice for the walls of houses in Norfolk, casts and copies and the occasional forgery. Robert Adam measured Diocletian's palace at Split and built the result across Britain; Lord Burlington came back with Palladio's drawings and put a Vicenza villa on the Thames at Chiswick. Neoclassicism was not a style that arrived in northern Europe — it was carried there, in luggage, by men who had spent a winter in Rome and wanted their own houses to remember it.
This is the oldest itinerary in the atlas and the ancestor of every one after it. Read in order, it is still a curriculum.