Grand Tour

Guidebooks constituted an essential aid for the traveler. It has been calculated that over the course of the 18th century at least two new ones were printed every year (among the best known, those of Misson, Lassels, Nugent and De Lalande), while in the following century the points of reference were Forsyth, Mariana Starke and Lady Morgan. However, we should not allow ourselves to be misled by the name “guidebook.” These were reports, journals and letters that aspired to serve as models, as “guides” for others, but they had very different characteristics from those of a modern-day guidebook. The practical information they supplied, when present, was mixed up with observations on the topography of cities, monuments, traditions and customs; everything was presented in an unpredictable, haphazard and rarely methodical way.

Not that there were no handbooks covering the material aspects of the journey. On the contrary travelers possessed many reliable sources of information on how to tackle the practical side of the Grand Tour and the everyday tasks that it entailed. The genre of “profitable instructions” was not the only one to prosper. In fact there was a flourishing line in the publication of oracles, talismans and vade mecums that set out to provide advice and instructions not in the field of observation but in that of the material journey.

However, the mental preparations recommended by one type of guide and the practical suggestions made by the other remained separate or, in the best of cases, were mixed up without following any true criterion, making no attempt to be systematic but presenting information almost at random.

Over the course of time, starting with Misson’s Nouveau voyage d’Italie (1688), the first important example of an account in which attention was paid to practical aspects, the genre would evolve in the direction of ever more meticulous advice. Thus Mariana Starke (first half of the 19th century) even gave the prices of washhouses and noted that at number twelve, Via San Francesco di Paola, in Naples could be found Carlo Torno, «ean excellent ladies’ shoemaker» preparing the ground for the guidebook in the modern sense of the term.

The radical change in the travel book that resulted from stripping it of the customary encyclopedic range of observations can be traced back to the first Murray guidebook (Handbook of Holland, 1836), an impeccable manual that marked the birth of modern mass tourism by setting out to meet the detailed needs of the new middle-class traveler in a hurry. It would be followed by the publication of the first of Baedeker’s major guides in 1839 and the Continental Railway Guide in 1847.

In the golden age of the tour, however, the traveler’s bag also had to contain books by two more writers, one to prepare the mind and the other to prepare the body: Misson and Miselli, author of Il Burattino veridico, overo istruttione generale per chi viaggia. Con la descrizzione dell'Europa (“The True Burattin, or General Instruction for Travelers. With the Description of Europe,” 1688).