Grand Tour

Even when every inch of the peninsula was covered, with the meticulousness of Deseine (1699) for example, who describes tiny sections of his route in which Pratolino and the Island of Elba appear alongside Siena, Arezzo and Florence, Rome, the capital of Catholicism, long remained the principal destination of the journey to Italy, and next came Venice, queen of the sea. The rest of Italy was simply a stage along the way. While it is true that several cities, and even some small towns, were often included in the itineraries, their presence was often incidental or almost irrelevant to the spirit and the eyes of the traveler.

Even Tuscany seems to have met with the same fate, however difficult the modern tourist might find this to believe. In fact 18th-century opinions of the region were generally gloomy, registering such negative elements as the slump in population or disparaging its artistic history, given that it was common to hear people speaking of medieval art and architecture as a “barbaric” aberration. For the English, for instance, the medieval towns and cities were far less interesting than Genoa or Venice or Rome in view of the fact that they possessed an equivalent, however faded, in their own Oxford or Cambridge. The refined Lord Burlington, on a visit to Pisa in 1714 to pay the inevitable homage to Piazza del Campo, chose to ignore Florence, and no lack of interest is more glaring than the one shown by Goethe. Berkeley, who in the first two decades of the 18th century spent a total of five months in Tuscany, concluded his tour of the region declaring that, after visiting Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia and Florence, « I have seen nothing that could make me wish to spend my life outside England.»

And yet, reading the accounts of travelers it is clear that the impression created by Florence was not a superficial one, just as the feelings that the city stirs have always been special and unique. All the indications are that the reasons for the fame it has earned have their roots in the distant part. It took centuries for Florence to win its indisputable supremacy, triumphing over all its rivals during the 19th century. Among the factors in this process were the recognition of the beauty of the Tuscan landscape, a blend of human labor and natural beauty, and the reassessment of the region's historical and artistic culture, together with the cosmopolitan modernity of Livorno.

The ascent of Peter Leopold to the throne was decisive. Under him, acknowledged as a great innovator in the institutional and economic fields, Tuscany became, in the eyes of Europe, the place where the theoretical propositions of the Enlightenment were put to a concrete test.

Crucial too were the actions of the English consul Horace Mann, who became a point of reference for foreigners passing through the city. As Anna Miller wrote in 1776: « Mann taught how to live, his table was elegant, his courteous manners enchanted everyone, including his compatriots. At the end of the 18th century Florence and its environs already seemed like a corner of England transported to Tuscany.»