Grand Tour

Although very convenient on paper, the river route was little used by travelers and this had a knock-on effect, resulting in inadequate development of its infrastructures.

We have already seen how the so-called Navicelli canal would occasionally be utilized to travel from Livorno to Pisa.

Another famous river passage, this time from Florence to Pisa, was made by Montfaucon (1699), the Benedictine monk who saw Italy almost exclusively in terms of manuscripts, in order to complete his studies of the figure of John Chrysostom: «On Wednesday 30 March, the day when all the Knights of the Order of Saint Stephen went there for the procession, we boarded the boat for Pisa; the banks of the river are beautiful in some places, and in others consist of arid hills. The river is broad in the plain, but narrows greatly in the mountains. Passing through Florence, and continuing for nine or ten miles, one comes to a large number of country houses. Then one passes under the Segna bridge shortly after a village. A country house belonging to the Grand Duke called Ambrosiana and the village of Empoli can also be seen; further downstream, close to a small river that comes from Lucca and flows into the Arno through a lake, one comes to the village of Bantino and further downstream that of Cascina. We arrived in Pisa at two in the morning».

The variability of the weather was one of the reasons why so few people chose to travel by river. The route was suggested to Peter Beckford (1787) but, out of fear of the rains, he decided to go by land: «The Arno was in full spate and they told us that it would have carried us at the same speed as the stagecoach. You go with the current, and in a covered boat. In summer it might not be unpleasant; but, in the rainy season, I would rather have been an egg in the belly of a duck. We took the stagecoach».