The Grand Tour. I have always been fascinated by it. The term was first used in a travel guide published in 1670 and reserved for those young British aristocrats who took journeys abroad to finish and refine their education when they had come of age, and served as an illuminating rite of passage. As time went on, the Grand Tour broadened its appeal to include a whole army of painters, collectors, designers, aspiring architects and Classical scholars.
As a student of English history and literature, I was intrigued by characters like the great architect Inigo Jones; Thomas Howard, the 14th Earl of Arundel; historian Edward Gibbon, and the writer and politician William Beckford. Travelling extensively through Italy, my home country, they had found joy and surprise in getting to know the historical city landmarks, from Turin to Naples via Rome and Florence, and admired the glorious masterpieces of their museums, while enchanted by the beauty of Venice and Siena and by the ravishing landscapes of the Tuscan hills.
I found the way they absorbed Italian history through ruins, churches, paintings, architecture and objets d’art enriching reading: Classical antiquity was interpreted in a more pragmatic way; Renaissance masterpieces were studied with a clinical eye; Roman ruins were reimagined more romantically. Some depicted Italy as a ‘picturesque place’, or as a place of backwardness, as reflected in the famous verses of Lamartine in which Italy is described as a ‘land of the past … where everything sleeps’. It’s a view I don’t find that offensive.
The Grand Tour had provided inspiration for hundreds of artists who helped feed a mania for all things Italian. While Pompeo Batoni’s fine portraits are a visual testament to the young, handsome adventurers of the Grand Tour of Italy. Their elegance, in both attire and poses, makes these works some of my favourites.
It took some years, if not decades, for me to go on my very own ‘Grand Tour’ of Italy. Stranded during the Covid summer of 2020, I was able to take advantage of one aspect of the travel restrictions: I managed traverse the country and see my favourite cities and their wonderful museums with hardly anyone one around. I was alone in front of Botticelli’s Primavera at the Uffizi, and in the Gesù Nuovo church in Naples; I was one of the very few pedestrians crossing the Rialto Bridge in Venice. I saw ‘my’ Italian treasures with a different eye: my fascination with the 17th and 18th centuries’ Grand Tour tales was back.
I had the same feeling while flicking through WoI photographer Manfredi Gioacchini’s recent photo book, Grand Tour (Quodlibet). Sitting alone before these pages, I marvelled at the magnificent fragments of marble-hewn human limbs in one of the courtyards of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and the line-up of emperors’ busts at the Musei Capitolini, both in Rome. The three trullo roofs of a masseria – or farmhouse – in Puglia look simultaneously isolated in time and utterly contemporary in their architectural design.
Leafing through the book, I smiled to see Franco Maria Ricci’s bamboo maze near Parma, which I had become lost in when I visited it years ago. The photograph of Florence’s Santa Maria Novella church, taken from the nearby Hotel Minerva, transported me into the atmosphere of EM Forster’s Room with a View. Just as rich and beautiful were the gardens of Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of popes down the centuries; those of Ninfa, which are still one of the not-so-well-known wonders of Italy; and of La Mortella in Ischia, famously designed by Susana Walton, the Argentinian wife of the British composer Sir William Walton.
From Palladio’s masterpiece of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza to Villa San Michele in Anacapri and the harmonic stripes of Rocchetta Mattei’s arches; from the domed marble Tempio del Valadier in Genga, to the dusty mess of the books in Palermo’s State Archives, to the perfectly proportioned body of a resting Hercules at the Archaeological Museum in Naples, my journey through these pages ends in La Serenissima, at sunset, where Manfredi’s pictures capture the enchantment beheld by all those who have set off on the Grand Tour, whether on foot or through the imagination.
A version of this article appears as the preface to ‘Grand Tour’ by Manfredi Gioacchini
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