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.

For members of the social elite in 18th-century England, extended travel for pleasure came to be considered part of an ideal education as well as an important symbol of social status. Italy, and especially Rome - a fashionable, exciting, and comfortable city - became the focus of such early tourists' interest. In this book, historian Jeremy Black recreates the actual tourist experiences of those who travelled to Italy on a Grand Tour. Relying on the private diaries and personal letters of travellers, rather than on the self-conscious accounts of literary travellers who wrote for wider audiences, the book presents an authentic picture of how British tourists experienced Italy, its landscapes, women, food, music, Catholicism, and more. illustrations, the book highlights the discrepancy between the idealised view of the Grand Tour and its reality: what people were meant to do was not necessarily what they did, what the guide books described as splendid was not always so perceived. Black quotes British visitors as they reflect on their trips, and he discusses what their Italian experiences meant to them. And he considers the intriguing effects of tourism on British culture during this most exciting of centuries.

The world is a big place full of interesting things. And The Grand Tour has seen some of them. That’s why few people are better placed to lead you around this vast planet of ours than Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. As long as you don’t mind getting hot and lost. Welcome, everyone, to The Grand Tour Guide to The World.

This work examines the forms of language that map out Italy as an imaginative topography of pleasure within British and French travel writing, over the period 1600 to 1830. It considers the tour with reference to strategies of description and themes.

Sex and travel have always been intertwined, and never more so than on the classic Grand Tour of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today the Continent is still littered with salacious remnants of that golden age, where secret boudoirs, notorious dungeons, and forbidden artifacts lured travelers all the way from London to Capri. In The Sinner’s Grand Tour, celebrated historian and travel writer Tony Perrottet sets off to discover a string of legendary sites and relics that are still kept far from public view. In southern France, an ancient text leads him inside the château of the Marquis de Sade, now owned by fashion icon Pierre Cardin. In Paris, an 1883 prostitute guide helps him discover the Belle Époque fantasy brothel Le Chabanais and the lost “sex chair” of King Edward VII. Renaissance documents in the Vatican Secret Archives point the way to the Pope’s very own apartments in Vatican City, wherein lies the fabled Stufetta del Bibbiena, a pornography-covered bathroom painted by Raphael in 1516. With his unique blend of original research, sharp wit, and hilarious anecdotes, Perrottet brings us a romping travel adventure through the scandalous backrooms of historical Europe.

The topos of the journey is one of the oldest in literature, and even in this age of packaged tours and mediated experience, it still remains one of the most compelling. This volume examines the ways in which the legacy of the Grand Tour is still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act of travel. The essays in this collection examine a wide variety of literature—travel, memoir, and fiction—and explore the ways travel and ideas of “culture” have evolved since the heyday of the Grand Tour in the 18th century. The sites of the Grand Tour remain a powerful cultural draw, and they continue to define ideas of taste and learning for those who visit them.

This catalogue looks at the Grand Tour, a vital aspect of European civilisation in the age of the Enlightenment, from the point of view of several countries and includes the work of foremost artists of the period.