Writers of the Grand Tour Eighteenth Century. Travel to Italy and Literature Travel to Italy generates a great literary production Iinitially Travel journals,

Writers of the Grand Tour

Eighteenth Century

Travel to Italy and Literature• Travel to Italy generates a great literary

production• Iinitially Travel journals, memoirs,

autobiographies, authentic or ficitionalcorrespondence,

• Guidebooks – Guidebooks for travellers with practical information

(hotels, restaurants) from the middle of Nineteenth century with the rise of mass tourism (in England Murray’s 1837, in Germany Baedecker 1836).

• Novels with travel plots. Gothic romances. Poetry about visit to Italy(Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley)

• Art guides on paintings, sculptures, architecture, music, drama

Tourists of the Enlightenment: Addison

• Joseph Addison (1672–1719), who wrote of his travels on the Grand Tour in The Voyage of Italy, published in 1705.

• Written in a far more familiar travel diary style than the Coryate book of 1611, Addison reveals the enlightened, eighteenth-century view.

• On the Grand Tour a tutor, known as the “bearleader,” accompanied young gents and acted as both guide and tutor. Addison was the bearleader for two such young English lords, George Dashwood and Edward Wortley Montague.

• Among his observations in The Voyage of Italy is that in Rome “there are more statues in it than there are men in most other cities....”

Most prominent “narrators” of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour

JOSEPH ADDISON(1672-1719)

Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705)

Italy: a museum of classical antiquities (repetitive

catalogue)Addison as a commentator

on classics?

Samuel Sharp

• Samuel Sharp travelled to Italy in 1765– 1766 and was so disgruntled with the trip that he wrote a book condemning almost all things Italian:

• “The kitchen tables were filthy, the wine was bad … the streets swarmed with monks, beggars, and bedraggled paupers; cooks, postillions, and innkeepers were incompetent extortioners, and even the climate was insupportable.…”

SAMUEL SHARP(1700?-1778)

Letters from Italy, describing the Customs and Manners of that

Country (1766)

Critical account of the manners and customs of Italians

TOBIAS SMOLLETT(1721-1771)

Travels through France and Italy (1766)

Sharp account of ItaliansWhile in Italy, Smollett

met Laurence Sterne who in turn satirized his

attitude towards Italian customs and manners in

the character of Smelfungus in his

Sentimental Journey (1768)

A response to Sharp and Smollett: Giuseppe Baretti

GIUSEPPE BARETTI (1719-1789)

An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768)

Resident in London and teacher of Italian language and literature at Streatham Park (Thrales and Johnson)

Staunch defender of Italianness

LADY MARY WORTLEY

MONTAGU(1689-1762)

Letters (1765)

Aristocratic intellectualFamous for her Turkish

Letters (1764) and inoculation

Two different experiences of Italy (as a

wife and as a lover)

HESTER LYNCH THRALE PIOZZI

(1763-1852)

Observations and Reflections Made in

the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (1789)

“looking for pleasure beyond the limits of

innocence”

GOETHE

• One of the most important, enthusiastic, and influential of the early Grand Tourists to Rome was not English but German. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832) travelled to Italy in 1786 and later wrote in his Italienische Reise:

• “Were I not impelled by the German spirit and desire to learn and do rather than admire, I would stay on … in this school of light hearted and happy life....”

• Goethe still fondly remembered this “light hearted and happy life” in Rome in his 1789 book on the Roman Carnival.

Goethe nella Campagna romana con rovine romane

Quali modelli per la Cina?