955 Women and the Grand Tour of 18th-Century Italy
In the 18th century, tens of thousands of travelers embarked on the Grand Tour. They traveled from all corners of Europe, crossing the Alps going south and making their way to various Italian cities, including Rome, Venice, Florence, and Naples. At least 955 of those travelers were women. Their travels shaped politics, the arts, the market for culture, ideas about education and leisure, and what we understand today as the age of Enlightenment.
Giovanna Ceserani, professor of classics, kicked off the Clayman Institute’s fall quarter faculty talks with excitement for the academic year ahead, and the plans for brand new research. Her ongoing research has identified 955 women whose travels for the most part were previously unrecorded. “I want to take the time to get to know [the lives of] these 955,” Ceserani said.
She will expand on her findings in A World Made by Travel. This “Digital Grand Tour,” published by Stanford University Press in 2024, analyzes half a million data points from the Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800 to surface more than a thousand new figures not previously listed under the primary headings of the Dictionary.
Ceserani presented 22 of her 955 women, describing how she determined they were women in the first place and what the collected data told us about their lives. On the Grand Tour, women either accompanied men or were accompanied by men, and the Dictionary describes them as spouses, mistresses, daughters, siblings, women attendants and servants, women with titles like Baroness, and so on. Some women were divorced or widowed when they traveled. There were chuckles and groans of discomfort in the room when Ceserani described the women who were said to be accompanied by their “uncles.”
Whole lives, livelihoods, and dependencies sprung forth from Ceserani’s sample of 22. No one, let alone women, journeyed the routes of the Grand Tour alone. The relationships recorded by bureaucrats both at the arrival and departure of travelers illustrate not just gender roles, but gendered labor, the prevalence of sex tourism, and the malleability of family units and elite status. For example, Ceserani described an Italian woman who married a British tourist, and returned to Britain to become an elite lady. Ceserani speculated about a tourist who traveled to Italy with her lady-in-waiting, who in Italy married another servant, returning to Britain as a married couple.
“These are the kinds of things that you get from looking at women that you would not get just looking at men,” she said.
Image from Wikipedia commons. Caption: Painting by Marco Ricci (ca. 1709) depicting Catherine Tofts (white dress, right of center) in rehearsal among a dozen other opera musicians. Tofts (c.1685-1755) traveled to Italy from Britain in 1711. Unlike the 21 other women Ceserani spoke about, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography dedicated a primary heading to Tofts.
