A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy, 1701-1800

This remarkable dictionary identifies over six thousand British and Irish travelers who toured in Italy in the eighteenth century. Compiled from the celebrated archive accumulated by Sir Brinsley Ford, this volume provides brief formal biographies of these travellers, their Italian itineraries and selective accounts of their experiences as described in contemporary sources.

While the majority of travellers were young persons making the grand tour - discovering antiquity, the temptations of a brisk and irregular art market, the squalor and the riches of Italian life and travel - there were also many older visitors intent on some professional purpose, including prison reformer John Howard, agronomist Arthur Young and musicologist Charles Burney. Over three hundred artists, sculptors and architects made the trip.

The dictionary includes British antiquaries who became guides or art dealers in Rome or Naples, among them Mark Parker, Thomas Jenkins and Colin Morison. There were those who sought a warmer climate for their health; disconsolate Jacobites gathered round the exiled Stuart court in Rome as well as unsettled eccentrics, bankrupts and misfits.