Private Hospitality
The poverty and shabbiness of the post inns, which travelers sought to mitigate by bringing everything with them, from linen to cooking utensils, were the grounds for many querulous complaints: the freezing rooms, the damp beds, the scarcity of candles, the ceilings covered with cobwebs, the torment of bedbugs or fleas or lice, the impossibility of finding milk and butter.
One way of avoiding all this was to obtain hospitality in some private house. This was the enormous value of the letters of introduction which, depending on the person who had written them and his social standing, could open the doors of respectable, comfortable and well-equipped houses to the traveler. The custom was so widespread that even in the 19th century the most common guidebooks, like those of the Milanese publisher Artaria, urged tourists to “equip themselves with letters of recommendation” to the most distinguished families of the city, although with the “bourgeoisification” of travel those entries, which an aristocratic caste regulated and exchanged among its own members, began to be denied.
Essentially it was a journey from private home to private home that the poet Thomas Gray made in the company of the aristocratic and well-connected Horace Walpole between 1739 and 1741. Among them was the house in Florence where he was a guest, along with Walpole, of the British consul Horace Mann: «we are lodged here with Mr. Mann in an enchanting apartment; beneath the windows flows the Arno, from which we can fish. The sky is so clear and the air so mild that one can stay outdoors in a light dressing gown all night without the least danger; everybody runs to the marble bridge to listen to music, eat iced fruit and dine in the moonlight…».