ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that links between the development of empiricism and the wider context of travel, the encounter with the unfamiliar and accompanying methods of describing architecture. It looks at the ways in which the perceived was ordered and transformed into knowledge of the external world within the context of the Grand Tour throughout the seventeenth century. The production of most travel accounts of the Grand Tour such as those by John Bargrave and Samuel Drake was driven by a desire to bring things and ideas home, to overcome a physical distance by recording, categorizing, and defining the experience of the unfamiliar abroad. The Grand Tour in the form with which it is most commonly associated developed fully only in the eighteenth century, when better-off men — and a number of women — regarded it as part of their education to explore the European continent along common routes and ritualized itineraries.
