Introduction

In 1997 the Tate Gallery in London organised an exhibition on travel in the eighteenth century called ‘Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy’. ¹ Offering a compelling vision of who travelled, their destinations, their preoccupations, their entertainment, their collecting practices and the memorabilia of their travels, the exhibition, with its accompanying catalogue, provides a useful starting point for this volume, embodying as it does the dominant paradigm in Anglophone scholarship on early modern European travel: a British-led consumption of Italy’s art, antiquities and history. ²