Introduction

When continental Europe reopened to British travellers in 1814 and 1815, Sir Richard Colt Hoare anticipated a renewal of modes of travel he had known some twenty-five years previously. To ‘smooth the way’ for the ‘inexperienced tourist’, he quickly published a ‘retrospective’ guidebook, Hints to Travellers in Italy (1815), that unflinchingly recommends outdated books and maps, most published before 1786, and recounts his own youthful experiences in organising transportation, letters of credit, and passports, as if nothing essential had changed. In Hoare’s view, young tourists of any era resemble each other; they travel with fresh eyes, unencumbered by nostalgia for what might no longer be seen on the beaten track. Two decades of revolutionary upheaval, the removal or destruction of art and antiquities by Napoleon’s conquering armies, the redrawing of political boundaries, all are as nothing to the excitement of first impressions, and the seasoned traveller need only recall his own first steps abroad to sympathise. Yet Hoare also acts the part of fireside tutor, chiding inexperienced travellers lest they display the wrong kinds of excitement: ‘I should entertain but a mean opinion either of the taste or enthusiasm of any young man, who, on the morning subsequent to his arrival at Rome, did not… hurry to see the Coliseum’. Hints to Travellers thus becomes a synopsis of the goals and values of ‘what has generally been denominated the GRAND TOUR OF THE CONTINENT’, refashioned for a new generation. ¹