Grand Tour

The list that Deseine proposed at the end of the 17th century – citing the Accademia del Cimento for its research into physics and mathematics, the Accademia di Pittura Scultura e Architettura (“Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture”) and the famous Accademia della Crusca for the Italian language – presents a fairly faithful picture of the interests of travelers.

Founded in 1583 and linked to Leonardo Salviati, the Accademia della Crusca (“Academy of the Chaff,” alluding to its aim of sifting impurities from the language) was the one that attracted most attention. Coyer refers to it, while admitting to not having visited it personally and raising the problem of the gap between the written and spoken language: «who is not aware of the reputation of the Accademia della Crusca, as guardian of the purity of the Italian tongue? Having learned it myself solely from the writings of good authors, I have had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the language of people in the cities through which I have passed». De Brosses (1740) displays a surprising aversion to the institution. After talking about a menagerie of exotic animals, he ironically suggests that it behooves visitors to go to see «another sort of menagerie,» the hall of the Accademia della Crusca, which in order to fulfill the noble task that it has set itself ( «sifting and sieving the Italian language to pick out the best of the speech» ) has developed a series of puerile allusive devices that, while not taking away its great merit, should be ascribed, «like the bizarre names that the majority of Italian academicians have given themselves, solely to the poor taste in vogue at the time they were set up»: the chairs had a pannier for a seat and a baker's shovel for a back, the director was raised on a throne made of millstones, the table was a kneading trough, the wardrobes were sacks, the paper was taken from a flour hopper. Valéry (1828), while criticizing the academy's role as a «grammatical court,» guilty of censoring Tasso, praises its dictionary as an unparalleled model and defends the institution against the accusation of being prescriptive toward Italy as a whole when, in his view, it confined itself to preserving the purity of the Tuscan dialect.

Founded in 1657, the Accademia del Cimento was the first society of a scientific character to be established in Europe. The academy set itself the task of carrying out a rigorously experimental verification of the principles of natural philosophy, hitherto based on the authority of Aristotle. “Experiment” was the system adopted by the members of the academy as their scientific method and as their motto, given that cimento signifies test or trial. The academy closed its doors in 1667, but the experimental instruments used by the academicians for their observations of nature were left to bear witness to their activity, put on display first at Pitti and then at the Museo di Fisica e Storia Naturale.

The decadence of the sciences, or rather of liberal learning, was underlined by de Sade (1776) in his customary aggressive and disparaging tones. He declared the sciences to be so degenerate that the academy created by the grand duke, at which all the sciences were taught free of charge ( «for their intrinsic essence as the natural ornament of the aristocracy» ), had declined to such a point that it had not a single student. He went on, with vehemence, to speak of a «state of degradation and annihilation» for the Florentines, of a disgrace for Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli and Michelangelo and of the decay of the libraries, frequented only by hapless and destitute clerics.

As is only natural attention was focused on the academic life of Florence, given its indisputable scientific importance. Yet there travelers who took an interest in what was going on in other Tuscan cities. For example Delpuech de Comeiras (1804) provided an amused and somewhat sarcastic description of the large number of academies that had sprung up in Siena owing to the widespread interest in the sciences and literature among the population. Some of them had names he considered strange and even «ridiculous,» such as the Intronati ('Dazed') and the Innominati ('Nameless'). Everyone in Siena, according to him, took pride in being a scholar or a wit, or laid claim to being one.