Grand Tour Digital Project Workshop (Ceserani - Stanford)

The Grand Tour of Italy attracted thousands of northern Europeans throughout the eighteenth century. It was a formative institution of modernity, contributing to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, of ideas about leisure, and of practices of professionalism. The Grand Tour Project enriches our understanding of this phenomenon by bringing us closer to the diverse travelers, elites and otherwise, who collectively constituted its world. We are working with the more than five thousand entries in John Ingamells’ Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy to create a dynamic searchable database, along with digital visualizations, of these travelers’ journeys and lives. On this website you can read about our work on the Grand Tour Project and learn about some of its possibilities and anticipated outcomes.

The multidisciplinary character of the Grand Tour is reflected by the varied disciplinary expertise of the invited outside participants:

Malcolm Baker (UC Riverside), John Brewer (Caltech), Melissa Calaresu (Cambridge), Jeffrey Collins (Bard NYC), Paul Davis (Princeton), Simon Macdonald (EUI Florence), Carole Paul (UCSB), Sophus Reinert (Harvard), Catherine Sama (Rhode Island), Rosemary Sweet (Leicester)

Speakers will present new research on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour of Italy while engaging to varying degrees with the interactive database that we have been developing.