Misson's professional career was closely bound up with the Protestant denomination of the family he was born into. An advisor to the Parliament in Paris, he lost the post following the revocation of the edict of Nantes (1685). He then moved to England where he was hired to educate the earl of Arran, serving as tutor on his Grand Tour of the Netherlands, Germany and Italy ( 1687-88 ). The book that made him famous, entitled Nouveau voyage d'Italie, fait en l'ann&ecautee 1688. Avec un m&ecautemoire contenant des avis utiles à ceux qui voudront faire le même voyage (van Bulderen, The Hague 1691) was based on the notes he made during those years: it became the first bestseller of the travel writing genre, translated into English, German and even Dutch, and drew considerable criticism for its sarcastic comments on the Catholic church.

Misson's Nouveau voyage was an innovative work from the perspective of its contents, and the ¨critical¨ view of Italy that it offered. But it was also new from the viewpoint of its form, bringing the age of diarists to a close and taking on the character of a genuine guidebook, in its intentions and its framework. In fact the epistolary form allowed him to be at once concise and familiar. Thus he was able to achieve what he had set out to do: not to be exhaustive but just to write about what he had observed. He arrived in Italy in 1687 and reached Tuscany in the May of 1688, coming from Rome and then proceeding to Bologna. Following the Via Aemilia (Viterbo, Montefiascone, Bolsena, Acquapendente, Radicofani), he went first to Siena and then visited Pisa, Livorno, Lucca, Pistoia and Florence (May 1688), devoting one letter to the province and another to the capital. He would speak of these cities again in the volume M&ecautemoire pour les voyageurs , filled with new advice and suggestions.