Grand Tour

A common characteristic of the different means of transport was their more or less maddening slowness. The journeys were long (in 1821 it took Cobbett six days to go from Rome to Florence, traveling with a coachman), and so part of the resources put into the preparations prior to departure were devoted to organization of the time that would be spent traveling.

The most common pastime was reading. Indispensable volumes whose beauty served to console the traveler during the hours he spent shut up in the claustrophobic carriage were art books, often illustrated with fine engravings. The graphic tradition, especially in Great Britain, would specialize in this production of «picture albums and portfolios of engravings devoted to views of cities, particularly picturesque stretches of landscape and the Italian artistic tradition» (Brilli, 2004). The most luxurious carriages might be equipped with a miniature library of expensive sextodecimo volumes (costly both for the binding of the volumes and for the miniaturized cabinet-making required for the shelf used to hold them). But books of normal size would also keep travelers company when they were not even able to enjoy the landscape outside, because of the dust and the jolting.

When people tired of reading, the favored occupations were painting and writing. Much in vogue for the former were both the camera lucida (which «by means of a system of mirrors, allowed a scene – in general a view – to be reflected onto a pane of glass and then painted from life by placing a sheet of paper on top») and the so-called Claude Lorraine glass (named after the painter), «a slightly convex piece of glass, colored or with a black ground» through which the painter framed the landscape (Brilli, 2004).

By far the most common object taken on the journey, however, was the portable writing desk, “which consisted of a box made of precious wood or walnut fitted with a compartment for pens, a bottle of ink, a container for ash or some other absorbent powder with a perforated lid and other compartments for paper, as well as secret drawers that opened with a spring mechanism for private or valuable items. The box opened up to form an inclined surfaces, covered with leather or velvet, on which to write” (Brilli, 2004). It is thanks to its presence that we owe many of the drafts and notes which in the calm of the return to ordinary life would be turned into the travel books we read. The guidebooks also gave instructions on how to make powdered ink “out of peach stone, carbonized and combined with a portion of vitriol, ground rusk and gum arabic, to be mixed with hot wine or vinegar” (Astengo, 1992).