ABSTRACT
The ruins of Rome, Pompeii and Sicily particularly appealed to the classically educated elite though, as Rosemary Sweet has demonstrated; in the course of the century, British visitors came to display a preference for Florence over what were regarded as less salubrious cities elsewhere in the peninsula. The eighteenth century offers only rare examples of British authors writing about Italian history. Between private indulgence in the eighteenth century and public improvement in the nineteenth stood the figure of William Roscoe, connoisseur of Italian literature, and author of the first English-language biographies of Lorenzo de' Medici and Lorenzo's son Giovanni, Pope Leo X. Roscoe's intellectual world, itself best exemplified by the dissenter Joseph Priestley, was one in which the arts and sciences did not occupy separate spheres. In 1769 Roscoe was articled to an attorney and solicitor, John Eyes, whose death obliged him to complete his clerkship under Peter Ellames.
