Grand Tour

One piece of information that the traveler hardly ever failed to supply related to the “position” of the cities he was preparing to visit. The need to define, frame and summarize the salient facts about the place that was being described was one felt by all travelers, often even by those who on the whole showed indifference to the external setting of their visit. For this reason, it is possible to find clues to the landscape in the pages presenting a new city.

In the case of Florence, this was an almost obligatory passage. The point of view depended on the direction from which the traveler was coming, whether he was approaching the city from Bologna, Arezzo or Pisa, or even on his way back from Rome via Siena. One of the “fullest and most anodyne [examples], a true precursor of the modern tourist guidebook” (Brilli, 1987) is the one provided by Rogissart (1701). In it appear all the elements (the mountains acting as walls to the valley dotted with villas, the river Arno traversing the plain and cutting the city into equal parts) that would later be mixed up in various ways and used to lace even more romantic descriptions, such as Lady Montagu’s: «you cannot picture a more enchanting position than Florence’s. It is set in a fertile and pleasant valley, bathed by the Arno which runs through the city.»

Thus the city was revealed to the eyes of travelers as the final stage on a route through the hills that itself played a major part in the description. In fact, as Brilli puts it, «dating from as far back as the time of Boccaccio, the enthusiastic eulogy of the Florentine hills was rarely absent from the pages of travel journals in the 18th century, and over time became almost a customary rhetorical exercise».

An example comes from the writings of Smollett (1765), who was spellbound by the «delightful» countryside between Pisa and Florence: «all the trees in this tract were covered with vines, and the ripe clusters black and white, hung down from every bough in a most luxuriant and romantic abundance». Smollett was as interested in productivity as in the poetic feelings stirred by the view: replacing the rows of vines meant that «the ground of the inclosure is spared for corn, grass, or any other production». The Scotsman also stood out from the usual run of eulogists for his extremely realistic remarks about the Arno: «This river, which is very inconsiderable with respect to the quantity of water, would be a charming pastoral stream, if it was transparent; but it is always muddy and discoloured». Smollett's attention to concrete matters reflects the fact that, in the focus on the hilly setting, carried out with graduated lenses to suit the most diverse perspectives and moods, the act of approach to the city brought an increased emphasis on beauty, but often on “economics” as well. Although it did not have the fertile exuberance of the Bolognese countryside, the Florentine region was charming and variegated, the picture of cleanliness and prosperity and the fruit of a continual commitment to improving the techniques of production. Thus Burney (1770): «six miles from Florence , the countryside is beautiful, flanked by high, fertile and verdant mountains. Not a pole of land has been left uncultivated. This region appears to be the richest that I have seen in Italy».

Not coincidentally, much of these accounts of the hills is taken up by a description of the territory, of its mantle of vegetation and agricultural production. This was all grist to the mill of the admiration of the Tuscan landscape that was to establish itself, toward the end of the 18th century, as an «exemplarily Italian, indigenous landscape, graphically stylized and almost languid in its colors, to be contrasted with the ancient one of Rome and the Mediterranean one of the deep south» (Cusatelli, 1993).

From a strictly scientific point of view, the studies of Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti became an inescapable point of reference. Held in high regard by Lalande (1765), for example, they describe the natural environment of Tuscan with great competence and expound a theory on the nature and formation of the hills (Bossi, 1993).

Once the image of Florence surrounded by its hills had been presented, it was often complemented by a view from above. This was a typically 18th-century fashion that consisted in admiring the beauty of the plain, studded with country houses, and describing the silhouette of the city from the privileged viewpoint. Celebrated the enthusiasm of de Brosses (1740) who, as soon as he arrived in the city, went straight to Giotto’s Tower, from where he could see clearly how the Apennines split into two branches and the plain formed a sort of gulf, at the rear of which stood the city. The plain and seacoast were filled with «an incalculable number» of villas: «add to this the beauty of the countryside and the course of the Arno running through it; you will agree with me if I say that it is no ordinary vision.» A. C. Valéry (1828) mentions the heights of the Boboli Gardens as a place with a view appreciated by his contemporaries, even though he personally preferred the lodge of one of his fellow countrymen, Monsieur Leblanc.

Even though, as always, Florence ruled the roost, the idea of the succinct portrait of the city brought into focus with more or less studied precision from the surrounding territory was deeply rooted in the visual and literary habits of the traveler. So similar descriptions were made of other Tuscan cities. Here are some examples.

For Misson (1688), Lucca was situated in the middle of a fertile plain, which stretched for perhaps fifteen or twenty miles and was densely populated. Gibbon (1764) describes the sudden revelation of the city better: «from Florence to Pistoia one crosses a handsome plain for twenty miles […], beyond Pistoia the land closes in all of a sudden and one enters into the gorges and passes of very difficult mountains. Soon, however, the scene grows more cheerful; one emerges from these gorges into a small valley from which the mountains gradually veer away as one proceeds, and open up in the end to form a beautiful bowl in which the city of Lucca stands.»

Changing perspective, for Barthèlemy (1755) « nothing equals in beauty the valley that lies in front of Cortona, and that takes its name from the Chiana, the small river by which it is bathed. One has to picture a plain in the form of a rectangle, some fifty to sixty miles in length and ten in breadth, traversed by watercourses covered by trees arranged in rows; it ends to the east in the lake of Perugia and is surrounded on the other three sides by luxuriant hills that merge into the mountains of the Apennines in the distance.»