ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to study a handful of journeys qualitatively in order to paint a few portraits of the ‘entrepreneur-traveller’, to analyse the purpose of their journeys and to evaluate the way these particular travellers described some of the cities they passed through. Emphasis will be placed on the routes Italians took through Europe: a sort of reverse Grand Tour. In the dense network of relations between the peninsula and the rest of Europe, industrial and commercial exchanges were always crucial. Gaetano Mazzoni was an entrepreneur-traveller of the Restoration. Like many of his fellow industrialists, he sought to observe European achievements first-hand in order to put them to work in the firm he and his brother had inherited from their father. A ‘scientific’ figure, Marsilio Landriani was made president of the Patriotic Society in 1782, and embarked that same year on a journey to woo foreign entrepreneurs to settle in Lombardy, but to no avail.
