ABSTRACT
In the eyes of foreign travellers, the Italian peninsula seemed like an enormous cabinet of curiosities in which naturalia and artificialia voluptuously offered themselves to both senses and intellect. Renaissance art, Etruscan, Greek and Roman ruins, natural landscapes and active volcanoes alternated in quick succession before the enraptured eyes of Grand Tour travellers. If wonder was the passion excited by the extraordinary, Italy was a country where extraordinary views and extraordinary customs so abounded that the whole peninsula seemed to be a wonderland. Nature, art and social customs each helped to take foreign visitors by surprise. In Italy, everything was wonderful, from Michelangelo’s sculptures to the ruins of Ercolano, from Raphael’s paintings to Farinelli’s voice. From ambassadors, or Italian correspondents, foreign academies of science often received news of the ‘curious’ phenomena occurring in the peninsula, while popular magazines also contributed to the literary construction of Italy as wonderland. In the south, Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius offered unpredictable, marvellous performances whose details, once published, entertained naturalists abroad, and inspired painters with visions of eruptions they had never seen. The operations of nature seemed to escape order almost as often as Italians themselves ignored the rules, tacit or explicit, of ‘decorous’ social behaviour. In the country of Casanova and Don Giovanni, the ladies too, dallying with their cicisbeo on public occasions, enjoyed a degree of liberty verging on libertinism.1
