Rome

??????And Treach’ry reigns, and base Disguise,

??????And Murder—looking to the skies,

While sordid Selfishness appears

??????In low redundancy of fears.

??????O what can Music’s voice bestow,

??????Or sculptur’d grace, or Titian glow,

??????To recompense the feeling mind

??????For BRITISH virtues left behind?

Such people feared that not all the art on the Continent, no matter how good it was, could make up for Italy’s contagious lack of moral fiber and common decency. Fortunately, most of those who could afford the trip ignored these late-Puritan misgivings, and went anyway. You didn’t have to be all that interested in art, either. So it was with the biographer of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, for whom Italy was mainly a field for sexual tourism, like Thailand today. Boswell was quite undeterred by the pox, although, as one travel book remarked, “A great many of our gentlemen travelers have reason enough to be cross on account of some modish distemper the Italian ladies may have bestowed upon them with the rest of their favours.” “My desire to know the world,” he confided to his journal, “made me resolve to intrigue a little while in Italy, where the women are so debauched that they are hardly to be considered as moral agents, but as inferior beings.”

But to know that world—that was the problem. It is hard today even to imagine the difficulty of access that Italy presented in the eighteenth century. There were two ways of getting to it: by sea, and across the Alps. Both took weeks, which (depending on the weather) could lengthen into months, especially with stops to examine works of art. The sea route entailed an overland crossing through France to the Mediterranean, then a coast-hugging progress to the Franco-Italian border, and then a slow descent south through Genoa, Lerici, and thus to the Campagna and to Rome. John Mitford (1748–1830), later Baron Redesdale, described part of the sea passage he made in 1776:

From Genoa the Lerici travelers usually pass in a felucca to avoid the fatigue of a mountain journey along roads where only mules can keep their feet. These Mediterranean vessels are not formed for bad weather and they are manned by no very skilful mariners. Scarcely ever an oar’s length from the shore they creep under the rocks, and trembling at every wind are always afraid to hoist a sail. If the wind is very fair, eight hours will carry the felucca from Genoa to Lerici. But if the wind is the least contrary, or if it is so slight that these timorous seamen do not trust a sail, twenty hours’ rowing will hardly suffice.

If the sea tourist suffered boredom, discomfort, and seasickness, the land traveler might have worse problems, for he had as a rule to negotiate the Alpine pass of Mont Cenis. This was so steep and tortuous, and the road surface so blocked with ice and snow, that no horses could drag the coach over the pass. The vehicle then had to be dismantled at the foot of the incline, and the horses sent on, unencumbered. The wheels, axles, and all components of the coach, along with the tourists’ luggage, would then be loaded onto mules and sent ahead. At the Italian side of the pass, on the flat, where it was safe to do so, the coach was reassembled and the portmanteaux, crates, and everything else reloaded. And what of the passengers, who had been carried up the steep slope in chairs on poles? Thomas Pelham, in 1777, reported (a little surprisingly), “As to our own person there is neither danger nor inconvenience: it was so hard a frost that when we came to the top of the mountains we left our chairs and descended in sledges, which though very trying to the nerves was not unpleasant. It was the clearest day imaginable and the view beyond description.”

The delays must have been irksome, and there were occasional sorrows: Tory, Horace Walpole’s pet spaniel, was eaten alive by a wolf on his Alpine crossing. Surely not all tourists who attempted the Mont Cenis pass can have had the phlegm or adventurousness of a Pelham; but it was too late to retreat, Italy beckoned, and this was the only way to the land where lemon trees bloomed.

“I have not read the Roman classics with so little feeling,” declared the eighth duke of Hamilton, “as not to wish to view the country which they describe and where they were written.” This was at least part of the essential motive with which the Grand Tourist, recipient of a classical education, set out. Would the trip make it all worthwhile—the rigors of life at an English public school, the flogging, the fagging, the bullying, the hours spent construing Cicero and Virgil? Probably it would; but not always in the expected way.

Few visitors failed to be thunderstruck by the density of Rome’s Settecento cultural milieu. “As high as my expectation was raised,” ran one typical reaction, that of the English tourist Thomas Gray writing to his mother in 1740, “I confess that the magnificence of this city infinitely surpasses it. You cannot pass along a street but you have views of some palace, or church, or square, or fountain, the most picturesque and noble one can imagine.”

Of course, it mattered very much whom you knew, or had introductions to. Though some exalted Englishmen complained of the dearth of social life to which they had access—compared with the heady whirl of cities like Venice or Milan—there were certainly hosts aplenty. Many of the continental aristocrats who came to Rome in the eighteenth century were taken in hand by the city’s French ambassador, Cardinal Francois-Joaquin de Bernis, who entertained them most lavishly. In the papal Jubilee year of 1775, the visitors to Rome included Charles Theodore, the elector palatine; the princes of Brunswick; the earl of Gloucester and brother of George III of England; Archduke Maximilian of Austria; and innumerable lesser nobility. Up to 1775, there was a steady stream of exalted foreign visitors to Rome, but in the last quarter of the century it became a flood. It was Bernis’s firm conviction that the way he entertained his guests ought to be a direct reflection of the gloire of the king he represented, Louis XVI. His embassy, near Piazza di Spagna, was the center of feasts so extravagant they confounded their guests, even those who were quite accustomed to shows of abundance; and when the cardinal’s staff handed out the epicurean leftovers at the back door, even the commoners of Rome were left in no doubt about which was the premier Catholic power of Europe. This variation on the spectacle of Roman charity was repeated by other noble houses, on a lesser scale, throughout the city. Unsurprisingly, Bernis later complained that the cost of being Louis XVI’s ambassador had nearly bankrupted him.

This mania for high-priced private and official entertainment meshed with Rome’s insatiable desire for public extravagance. No Italian city, except possibly Venice, loved a parade or a ceremony as much as the papal capital, or staged as many. Just as in Caesar’s day, Rome and everyone in it, from its cardinals down to the raggedest urchin, was addicted to its Carnival, its feste, its holidays, cavalcades, illuminations, and processions, not forgetting its huge firework displays and distributions of free food and wine to the poor. These were the points at which entertainment crossed with official life, including the still extremely vigorous life of religion and the all-reaching power of the Papacy. When a newly elected pope took office, he would enact the ritual of the possesso, the “taking possession” of Rome, with a long cavalcade from the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano (the cathedral of the city), through the Capitoline Hill—re-enacting, in effect, the route of ancient Roman military triumphs. In the basilica, he would affirm his spiritual leadership of the Church; on the Campidoglio, where the leading magistrate gave him the keys of Rome, his political power over the city.

A more regular event, the “Chinea” ceremony, staged every year but abandoned in 1787,¹ was