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Friday 8 August 2008

Roman souvenir

Laura Gascoigne follows in the footsteps of the 18th-century Grand Tourist

For the 18th-century traveller in Italy several aspects of the Grand Tour were less than grand, but slumming it was part of the fun. Bentham was unusual in being a woman, and middle-aged. Most Grand Tourists were young men — ‘schoolboys just broke loose’, in the words of Horace Walpole — enjoying the equivalent of a post-university gap year under the loose supervision of ‘bearleaders’, some of whom were barely older than their charges. Their priorities, as one might expect, were socialising, drinking, gambling and sex, with cultural improvement relatively low on the list. The French man of letters Charles de Brosses even claimed in 1739 that some left Rome ‘without having seen anyone but other Englishmen and without knowing where the Colosseum is’. He was exaggerating about the Colosseum, but he was right about the company. In 1766 the young Marquess of Kildare reported chirpily to his mother that he had run into more than 40 Old Etonian chums in the space of nine months. Few British visitors to Rome, other than the odd Catholic, consorted with Italians. Edward Thomas spoke for many in 1750 when he expressed the fervent wish that he could have seen ‘Rome in its ancient splendour and adorned with her heroes, instead of the D***ls incarnate she is now generally replenished with’.

For anyone attempting to recreate the Grand Tour today, Rome remains almost miraculously unchanged. The devils incarnate are still in evidence — the driver of our taxi from Ciampino airport was a direct descendant — and thanks to the laid-back approach to city planning lamented by Bentham the streets are still narrow and the palazzi the same delightful mixture of dirt and finery. The large open spaces are now choked with Vespas rather than vegetables, and the hawkers patrolling the Spanish Steps flog Chinese-made Flash Whirly Wheels to backpackers at three for 10 euros rather than fake antiquities to the British carriage trade for tens of zecchini. In the former ‘English Ghetto’ around the Piazza di Spagna, the local restaurants continue to lard on the oil and garlic once so repugnant to the 18th-century British palate, and anyone hankering after ‘boiled leg of pork, and peas-pudding’, like the 18th-century Dorset gentleman Peter Beckford, will have to settle for zampóne and lentils. But Babington’s Tea Rooms still brews a peerless cuppa, and the Hotel d’Inghilterra in Via Bocca di Leone offers James Bond cocktails in a gentleman’s club bar. What has changed in Rome is not the quality of life, but the quality of tourists. At the Vatican and Capitoline Museums and the Villa Borghese you can still see the sculptures and paintings on the Grand Tourists’ must-see list, often in exactly the same positions. What you can’t see, sadly, are the sorts of Grand Tourist paraded in the National Gallery’s forthcoming tercentenary exhibition of Pompeo Batoni (1708–87).

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