Fig Katharine Read, (1750). British Gentlemen in Rome from the Yale Center for British Art.
The Grand Tour Project, directed at Stanford by Giovanna Ceserani, enriches our understanding of the phenomenon known as The Grand Tour by bringing us to the diverse travelers, elite and otherwise, who collectively constituted its world.
The Grand Tour of Italy attracted thousands of 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.
We have been working with the more than five thousand biographical entries in the Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy (published by the Paul Mellon Centre [PMC] and compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive held at the PMC) to create a dynamic searchable database of these travelers’ journeys and lives. This database--the Grand Tour Explorer--is at the core of the open-access publication A World Made by Travel: the Digital Grand Tour launched in June 2024 for the digital projects series for Stanford University Press, framed by introductory chapters explaining its digital approach, contains exemplary essays by leading scholars who worked with its data, and offers resources designed to help teachers bring this wealth of new material into the classroom. On this website you can read about this publication and other work on the Grand Tour Project and learn about some of its capabilities, achievements and anticipated outcomes.
A World Made by Travel
A World Made by Travel combines —in dynamic format— original research with data and visualizations about the lives and journeys of 6,007 travelers, including hundreds of women, servants, workers, and Italians not previously represented among the Dictionary’s primary headings.
At its core is the Grand Tour Explorer, a groundbreaking interactive database containing raw downloadable data, visualizations, and documentation. This digital Grand Tour argues for the historical and continuing significance of eighteenth-century travel to Italy by showing it in a new light and with unprecedented granularity. By opening up pressing questions of scale and representation, it models how digital approaches that involve shareable data can facilitate original research and generate new knowledge about the past.
Want to learn more about other dynamic interactive applications for the study of the Grand Tour that we have made public?
