"According to the 1747 publication The Art of Governing a Wife, women in Georgian England were to "lay up and save, look to the house, talk to few and take of all within." However, some women broke from these directives and took up the distinctly male privilege of traveling to the Continent to develop mind, spirit, and body. For many the Grand Tour -- often undertaken in great parades of coaches laden with servants, trunks, and furniture -- became an intellectual and romantic rite of passage. The landscape, health spas, salons, and social scene of Enlightenment Europe provided a wealth of glamorous, revolutionary, and therapeutic experiences from which many ladies returned "the best informed and most perfect creatures." Brian Dolan leads us into the hearts and minds of the ladies through their stories, thoughts, and court gossip, recorded in journals, letters, and diaries. Ladies of the Grand Tour creates a mesmerizing portrait of a previously overlooked slice of eighteenth-century life."

According to The Art of Governing A Wife (1747), women in Georgian England were supposed to alay up and save, look to the house; talk to few and take of all within. However, some broke from these taboos and took up the previously male privilege of travelling to the Continent to develop mind, spirit and body.

In 1817, two English cousins take a honeymoon "Grand Tour of the Continent" with their new husbands and become entangled in a mysterious plot to create a magical Emperor of Europe.

In 1819, the Murray family set out on one of the last Grand Tours before railways forever changed the way people travelled. The eldest daughter of the Second Earl of Mansfield, Lady Frederica Murray (later Stanhope, as she married James Hamilton Stanhope, the youngest son of the 3rd Earl of Stanhope) kept a diary on the tour, which this book explores in detail. The diary has never been published (not even mentioned in any of the Grand Tour literature) and is a fascinating and essential look at the Murray/Mansfield family, and Europe at the time. Frederica was a deeply observant traveller and noted down numerous picturesque and historical details; she was also very open and sometimes even cutting in her opinions when she came across something or someone she did not like. Frederica’s diary shows a very mature 19-year-old with clear opinions on art, literature and the world around her. This book will therefore be interesting for scholars of travel, Grand Tours, and Regency England and its society, as well as anyone with an interest in travel and history.

In the age of the Grand Tour, foreigners flocked to Italy to gawk at its ruins and paintings, enjoy its salons and cafés, attend the opera, and revel in their own discovery of its past. But they also marveled at the people they saw, both male and female. In an era in which castrati were "rock stars," men served women as cicisbei, and dandified Englishmen became macaroni, Italy was perceived to be a place where men became women. The great publicity surrounding female poets, journalists, artists, anatomists, and scientists, and the visible roles for such women in salons, academies, and universities in many Italian cities also made visitors wonder whether women had become men. Such images, of course, were stereotypes, but they were nonetheless grounded in a reality that was unique to the Italian peninsula. This volume illuminates the social and cultural landscape of eighteenth-century Italy by exploring how questions of gender in music, art, literature, science, and medicine shaped perceptions of Italy in the age of the Grand Tour.

Language is still a relatively under-researched aspect of the Grand Tour. This book offers a comprehensive introduction enriched by the amusing stories and vivid quotations collected from travellers' writings, providing crucial insights into the rise of modern vernaculars and the standardisation of European languages.

An introduction to the raucous yet educational 'gap year' tours of Europe taken by wealthy British aristocrats in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For many young eighteenth-century aristocrats, the Grand Tour was an essential rite of passage. Spending many months travelling established routes through France and Italy, they would visit the great cultural sites of western Europe – from Paris, through to Venice, Florence and Rome – ostensibly absorbing art, architecture and culture. Yet all too often, it was a gateway to gambling and debauchery. In this beautifully illustrated guide, Mike Rendell shows how the tour reached its zenith, examining the young tourists' activities and how they acquired 'polish' and an appreciation for fashion, opera and classical antiquity. He also explores their passion for souvenirs and art collecting, and how these items made their way back to grand country houses, which were themselves often modelled to the rules of classical European architecture.