Postcards from Abroad

Snippets from the journals and letters of famous Grand Tourists.

We ascended by a dark, narrow, steep stair, into a kind of public room, with a long table and benches, so dirty and miserable, that it would disgrace the worst hedge ale-house in England.... At length the landlord arrived, and gave us to understand, that he could accommodate us with chambers. In that where I lay, there was just room for two beds, without curtains or bedstead, an old rotten table covered with dried figs, and a couple of crazy chairs. The walls had once been whitewashed: but were now hung with cobwebs, and speckled with dirt of all sorts; and I believe the brick floor had not been swept for half a century. We supped in an outward room suitable in all respects to the chamber, and fared villainously. The provision was very ill-dressed, and served up in the most slovenly manner. You must not expect cleanliness or conveniency of any kind in this country. For this accommodation I payed as much as if I had been elegantly entertained in the best auberge of France....

—Tobias Smollett, novelist, 1765

By the road of Bologna and the Apennine I at last reached Florence, where I reposed from June to September, during the heat of the summer months. In the gallery, and especially in the Tribune, I first acknowledged, at the feet of the Venus of Medicis, that the chisel may dispute the pre-eminence of the pencil–a truth in the fine arts that cannot, on this side of the Alps, be felt or understood.

—Edward Gibbon, historian, from his Autobiographies, 1796

Behold the wrecks of what a great nation once dedicated to the abstractions of the mind! Rome is a city, as it were, of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die, and who survive the puny generations which inhabit and pass over the spot which they have made sacred to eternity.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, 1819

I must admit that in the midst of my Roman studies I indulged in sensual relaxations. I sallied forth of an evening like an imperious lion, and I had a little French painter, a young academician, always vain, always alert, always gay, who served as my jackal. I remembered the rakish deeds of Horace and other amorous Roman poets, and I thought that one might well allow one's self a little indulgence in a city where prostitutes are licensed by the Cardinal Vicar.... I was, however, brought to a halt by an unpleasant occurrence which all libertines have to reckon with.

—James Boswell, writer, 1765

Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, whose foam-like column sometimes darted into the clear dark sky, and fell in little streaks along the wind.... The day was radiant and warm. Every now and then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air and light of day, which interpenetrated our frames, with the sullen and tremendous sound. This scene was what the Greeks beheld (Pompeii, you know, was a Greek city). They lived in harmony with nature; and the interstices of their incomparable columns were portals, as it were, to admit the spirit of beauty which animates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what was Athens?

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, 1819

Venice is in the estro of her carnival, and I have been up these last two nights at the ridotto and the opera, and all that kind of thing. Now for an adventure.... At ten o'clock I was at home and alone (Marianna was gone with her husband to a conversazione), when the door of my apartment opened, and in walked a well-looking and (for an Italian) bionda girl of about nineteen, who informed me that she was married to the brother of my amorosa, and wished to have some conversation with me.... When lo! in a very few minutes, to my very great astonishment, Marianna Segati, in propia persona, and after making a most polite courtesy to her sister-in-law and to me, without a single word seizes her said sister-in-law by the hair, and bestows upon her some sixteen slaps, which would have made your ear ache only to hear their echo. I need not describe the screaming which ensued....

...I found that Marianna in the morning had seen her sister-in-law's gondolier on the stairs, and, suspecting that this apparition boded her no good, had either returned of her own accord, or been followed by her maids or some other spy of her people in the conversazione, from whence she returned to perpetrate this piece of pugilism.... After about an hour, in comes–who? Why, Signor Segati, her lord and husband, and finds me with his wife fainting upon the sofa, and all the apparatus of confusion, disheveled hair, hats, handkerchiefs, salts, and smelling-bottles–and the lady as pale as ashes, without sense or motion. His first question was, "What is all this?"

...You need not be alarmed. Jealousy is not the order of the day in Venice, and daggers are out of fashion; while duels, on lover matters, are unknown–at least, with the husbands. But, for all this, it was an awkward affair. He must have known that I made love to Marianna, yet I believe he was not, till that evening, aware of the extent to which it had gone. It is very well known that almost all married women have a lover; but it is usual to keep to the forms, as in other nations....

—Lord Byron, poet, 1817

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