Fig Katharine Read, (1750). British Gentlemen in Rome from the Yale Center for British Art.
The Grand Tour Project, directed at Stanford by Giovanna Ceserani, enriches our understanding of the phenomenon known as The Grand Tour by bringing us to the diverse travelers, elite and otherwise, who collectively constituted its world.
The Grand Tour of Italy attracted thousands of Europeans throughout the eighteenth century. It was a formative institution of modernity, contributing to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, of ideas about leisure, and of practices of professionalism.
We are working with the more than five thousand entries in the Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy (compiled by John Ingamells from the Brinsley Ford Archive) to create a dynamic searchable database, along with digital visualizations, of these travelers’ journeys and lives. On this website you can read about our work on the Grand Tour Project and learn about some of its capabilities, achievements and anticipated outcomes.
The Grand Tour Explorer
The Grand Tour Explorer is the application we are creating to interact with the database of eighteenth-century travelers to Italy which we have been digitally drawing from the thousands of entries in John Ingamells’ Dictionary. It is a dynamic research resource that allows to search, browse, visualize, organize into lists, and dowload our data about these travelers’ journeys and lives.
Want to learn more about the dynamic interactive applications for the study of the Grand Tour that we have already made public?
