Travelogue: Destination Italy

For her, Northern Italy was the gateway to our country, but also the way back to her homeland, England, at the end of her singular and tragic Grand Tour in 1823: starting from the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, where Shelley's son, husband and some close friends are buried, Tobias Jones follows in her footsteps in Genoa and on the Ligurian-Tuscan coast, the conclusion of her Grand Tour which ended tragically with the death of her husband Percy B. Shelley by sea, while he was trying to reach the "Gulf of Poets" with his boat.

Rome, the undeniable gravitational center of every pilgrimage, even during the Grand Tour era. The controversial libertine writer and philosopher Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, the Marquis De Sade, was also attracted to it. In fact, he became a writer just after returning from his Grand Tour. Here the Marquis comes to terms with the Church, the Catholic religion and Baroque, far from his Enlightenment Weltanschauung, but also with the countless attractions of the Eternal City.

Naples holds a special place in the heart of the "grand tourists". Here, in 1857, American writer Herman Melville also arrived. Through the pages of the writer's travelogue and literary works, we discover the mid-1800s city of Naples, where Melville was able to enjoy the beauties of the city (from the Catacombs of San Gennaro to the Maschio Angioino, from the Grotto of Seiano to the Villa of Pollione and Capodimonte), but also witnessed historical events in progress, such as those concerning King Ferdinand, known as "Re Bomba" ("King Bomb").

If until the first half of the 18th century the Grand Tour of Italy went only a little further than Naples, in more advanced times the foreign travelers in the Italian peninsula went even further south. Sicily and Magna Graecia – Palermo and Segesta in particular – thus became unmissable destinations for the "grand tourists," who were the first to narrate those beauties in their diaries. Among them, the German thinker and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1787 came to Italy to "look for" the raved Arcadia of Neoclassicism – and believed to have found it in Sicily.