Painting and Social Identity in Eighteenth-Century Italy. 5

Approaches to Rome on the Grand Tour.

Unlike Florence, there was a very different cultural situation in Rome. There was no paucity of views, records, maps, written accounts of the Eternal City. It was clearly the main destination of travellers on the Grand Tour, and to most of them, Florence was just a place on the road to Rome, their ultimate cultural goal. Above all, in “a culture dominated by the classics, Rome was the focus of interest and tourists responded accordingly.”¹ There was a thriving tourist economy in Rome, supported by a network of cicerones, antiquarians, dealers, artists, and other experts versed in aspects of the city’s history and culture. In addition to the classic monumentality of its ruins, Rome also offered the visitor baroque painting, sculpture and architecture. Rome was approached via cities like Siena which generally didn’t meet with the approval of the travellers, again another way-station to them. Neither were visitors enamoured of the approach to the city across the Roman campagna described by one traveller as “wretched, barren, sandy country all the way to the very gates of Rome.”² However, the Roman campagna with its expansive views of Rome proved irresistible to artists like Richard Wilson and John Frearson (above),³ who under the influence of Claude, represent the city and its environs in a roseate glow. The first port of call on arrival in Rome would have been somewhere like the Piazza di Popolo or the Piazza di Spagna. The latter was famous for spectacular entertainments like the Roman carnival and the Girandola, the annual fireworks display set off from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. Various artists painted the pyrotechnics and there is an amusing drawing by Scottish artist David Allan that shows a young aristocrat’s coach arriving in the Piazza della Spagna during the Roman carnival. It is a wonderful (and satiric) evocation of Roman society. From the steps of the Villa des Londres, a servant disperses beggars while on the other side of the square can be seen the Caffé degli Inglesi. Finally, there is a group of ciceroni and picture dealers offering pornographic images as well as copies or fakes of Old Masters.

1Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour, (Yale University Press), 2003, 47.

2Charles Abbot (1788) quoted in Black, 46.

3 F set off for Italy with the painter William Theed in 1790, but travelled alone when Theed was recalled to England. F stayed mainly in Rome.