From Mariana Starke’s Travel Guides to Baedeker.
“the traveller [to Italy] should consider this building [Abbey of San Marco] as one of the main objects for which he visits Florence.”[1] Mariana Starke, Letters from Italy.
Sometime before Baedeker and the Michelin guides came on the scene, there were the travel writings of Mariana Starke. Her Letters from Italy were published between 1792 and 1798, and in addition to commenting on the art, she gave information about the political situation, hotels, money etc. With her husband Mariana visited Tuscany, particularly Pisa and Florence. Sadly, her husband Richard died in Pisa on 5th March 1794; he was buried at Livorno. As Francis Haskell says, Letters from Italy was meant as “a guide to others than as a record of personal experiences.”[2] What was most notable about Mariana’s guides was her use of exclamation marks, initially purely subjective, but later systematized to denote her opinion of a picture or statue. The edition of 1825 contains two references to the Beato Giovanni Angelico’s paintings at San Marco, one with exclamation mark. For Haskell this represented a concession to new tastes. This was retained for the final edition in 1839 where the visitor to San Marco is advised “the traveller [to Italy] should consider this building as one of the main objects for which he visits Florence.”[3] The spirit of Mariana’s guides, though not necessarily the letter, was continued in the John Murray Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy, which was written by Sir Francis Palgrave and published anonymously in 1842. Unlike Starke, Palgrave, foreshadowing Berenson a hundred years later complimented the quattrocento and played down the significance of the later periods that followed the death of Michelangelo. As Palgrave states: “Since the death of Mrs Starke, her popular work, has owing to the rapid change of circumstances, become in a measure antiquated for the districts before mentioned (Tuscany and N. Italy).”[4] It was in this period of the early nineteenth-century that Verlag Karl Baedeker founded his celebrated, indispensable series of guides for businessmen, tourists, and travellers in general. These contained/contain maps and introductions; information about routes and travel facilities; and descriptions of noteworthy buildings, sights, attractions and museums, written by specialists. The only difference between Baedeker and Starke is that she was the sole author and she used exclamation marks instead of stars to mark items worthy of interest.
[1] Cited in Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some aspects of taste, fashion and collecting in England and France, (Phaidon, 1976)s, 170.
[2] Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries…
[3] Cited in Haskell, Rediscoveries, 170.
[4] Cited in Haskell, Rediscoveries, 171
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