What was the Grand Tour?

Think of it as a gap year that could last several years, with a tutor in tow and a very large luggage allowance. The Grand Tour shaped what northern Europe thought Italy was, and in many ways it still does: the idea that you go south to see art, eat well, be changed and write about it afterwards comes straight from it.

Who went

According to Wikipedia's account of the Grand Tour, the classic traveller was a young man of around 21 from the British nobility or wealthy gentry, usually accompanied by a tutor. Similar journeys were made by young men from other northern European countries, and, from the late eighteenth century, by some Americans. Women travelled too, more often later in the period and usually with a chaperone. A tour could last anything from a few months to several years.

The purpose was part education, part polish, part rite of passage: exposure to classical antiquity and Renaissance art, practice in languages and manners, and the chance to mix with polite society abroad before settling into adult life at home.

Where they went

The route had a familiar rhythm:

• Paris, to learn French and acquire some manners.
• Switzerland and the Alps, crossed which was no small undertaking before modern roads.
• Turin, often the first Italian city.
• Florence, for the Renaissance.
• Venice, for the spectacle.
• Rome, the real destination, for the ruins and the collections.
• Naples, and often Pompeii and Herculaneum nearby.

Some travellers came home through the German-speaking lands and the Low Countries, looping back rather than retracing their steps.

What they brought back

Travellers bought art, books, coins, antiquities and scientific instruments, and commissioned portraits that showed the folks back home how worldly they had become. Painters such as Canaletto and Pompeo Batoni did very well out of them. Less wealthy travellers bought Piranesi's etchings of Rome.

The books it produced

The Grand Tour was a literary event as much as a social one. A few of the books it left behind:

• Richard Lassels's The Voyage of Italy (1670), published after his death, is credited with popularising the term "Grand Tour" itself.
• Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766), a set of letters from a journey in the 1760s, sharp, funny and famously grumpy. Wikipedia's entry on the book notes that it sold well at first.
• Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) answered Smollett by mocking him as "Smelfungus", the archetype of the bad-tempered traveller. Every holiday has a Smelfungus.
• Goethe's Italian Journey, about his travels of 1786 to 1788 and published in 1816-17, is the most famous of all: a great writer taking leave from his duties and finding himself in Rome, Naples and Sicily. See our page on Goethe's Italian Journey.

The tradition runs on into later fiction about English visitors finding themselves in Italy; our page on A Room with a View covers one much-loved example.

Why it ended

Interest in classical culture faded, and cheap rail and steamship travel opened Italy to far more people. By the 1870s organised tours, of the kind Thomas Cook made famous, had turned the aristocratic journey into something closer to modern tourism.