Grand tour

Three hundred years ago, wealthy young Englishmen began taking a post-Oxbridge trek through France and Italy in search of art, culture and the roots of Western civilization. With nearly unlimited funds, aristocratic connections and months (or years) to roam, they commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled with the upper crust of the Continent. No one knows who came up with it, but their adventures soon had a perfectly appropriate name: the Grand Tour.

By the late eighteenth century, the nearby city of Naples was a goal for every educated traveler, and a visit to Capri a high point of every Grand Tour. In fact, looking back over the last 250 years, it seems that every sexual libertarian in the West made his or her way to its shores, where paganism soundly trumped austere Christian morality and inhibitions wilted under the warm southern sun. The islanders' casual attitude to sex was legendary: It was whispered that the most shocking […]

As such, it is indicative of the fact that by the 1780s a more informed interest in the history of the middle ages and the 'gothic' era was already beginning to make itself felt amongst the literate travelling public, even in that most classical of environments, the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour as a cultural institution underwent a fundamental change in character during the nineteenth century, as we saw in the introduction, both in terms of itinerary and the composition of the travelling classes.