Dr David Moses, Assistant Head 6th Form, has now written the following review:

Vicenza is printed in English though there are some Italian language editions available. The edition is without doubt a very valuable one, seeking as it does to make connections across disciplines better to show from early modern Italy the movement of ideas, literary influences, and the transmission of significant artistic and architectural ideas through the medium of travel journal writing. The work is innovative in its layout and seeks to be as thorough in its citations as possible by using a cross-referencing system which may take the reader to two or more endnotes or biographical notes when there is related content. 

The book begins with a quotation from Francis Bacon (1561–1626) advocating the educational value of travel, which sets the time period, tone, tenor and context for the narratives and allows the authors to define “early tourists” and their disparate backgrounds and nationalities. We are told that the structure and text of this guide “are based on the prototype of the first guide to Italy, itinerarium nobiliorum Italiae regionum, urbium, oppidorum, et locorum” by Franz Schott and a Dominican friar Girolamo Giovanini de Capugnano, published in 1600 (5).

As one reads on it becomes clear that a considerable number of journal accounts are pieced together into a unified narrative. This is a major strength of the text, in its mapping of early journal writing about the region, and in recording personal responses to the perceptions of a location which is propagating what will become influential ideas Europe-wide. Correlations are made between early tourism and the journals which record the apparent influences of these new worlds on Shakespeare’s “Italian” plays, thereby characterising Italy as the locus amoenus inspiring a significant cultural and literary exchange.

At the end of the opening section is a timeline and historical context grid running from 1540 – 1650 and columnated under three headings: events in history, Italian journeys (and their journals) and literary and scientific publications. This allows the reader quickly to contextualise journeys not merely against significant events but also to site them next to significant contemporary publications and writings in Europe, the implicit suggestion being that the transference and influence of Italian culture arrives in England by the analogues of diarists. Compellingly, details about Italy mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare and others are shown often to be accurate, though of course their playwrights were never known to have left England.

The introductory section to the city of Vicenza of the early tourists is instantly compelling. It gives an overview of the city again combining a number of journal writers’ accounts, and is supported with detailed, comprehensive endnotes giving clarification or further information. The narrative is the result of Schott’s and other early tourists’ chronicles brought together into a single narrative, largely in the first person. To make their point the authors have chosen to bring pictorial content to each page which allows the reader to measure the early-modern descriptions and images against up-to-date photographs and maps, making the message clear; fascinatingly, these guides and journals are still viable and largely reliable. Of course, these are also historical narratives and if the descriptions of the wool trade and of silk production are worthy of note then the enthusiasm for the architecture of Palladio is enlightening, and stands as an important documentary account of the genesis of the influence of the Palladian on English architecture. 

The book moves on to deal with the specific sites of the city, starting with the old city centre and including another superb map of the sites of interest, and enumerated along the itinerary of the earliest tourists. This section of the guide, starting with the Teatro Olimpico and ending with Villa Almerico Capra Valmariana “La Rotunda” (31 – 111) makes for highly informative and at times captivating reading. The greatest care has been taken to draw together the earliest accounts of each site of interest, matching them with original sketches, pen and ink drawings, original architectural designs, maps and modern images. Photography of fine artistic and architecture details still in situ serve to illuminate the diarists’ accounts, and reveal moreover that contemporary preoccupation with the new and exotic as characterised by the Palladian. The authors add visual context too to each account, giving illustrations of the contemporary art, artefacts, and coins which the early journalist would have encountered on their visits and tours. 

The epilogue to this section of the book is most informative. Journal accounts turn away from sites and deal with accommodation, customs, agriculture, and the wine and food of the region. This makes for fascinating reading because it presents such visceral detail: “we lunched at Cappelletto and stayed at The Three Kings. Here I paid forty soldi for my supper, and eighteen soldi for three measures of oats, called quartaroli. […] whatever extraordinary things can be said about the great abundance of wine, great is also its variety of colour and taste (a rare thing), fruit of the nature of the land, that the most delicate palate may meet its full satisfaction, both in winter and summer, as well as in autumn, with those thick wines, good nonetheless, for the old wines already start to run scarce by then’. (113) Such detailed accounts seem to close the gap of half a millennium. Where appropriate the authors add a quotation from Shakespeare to their page so that the reader may compare such a description to one cognate from the works of the bard (115 – 116). In the same mode the following section The Vicentine Territories sits journal accounts next to photographic images of the sites described, again with that keenly honed focus on early modern Venetian culture and its incipient tourism, exploration and documentation. 

Again innovative, the final section of the work is a biography. Entitled The Early Tourists, it gives a short biographical account of each of the source journal writers, with their dates, education, and where possible reproduces a painted image. To the literary scholar it will not go unnoticed that among this group is Edward De Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, of whom one theory ascribes the notion that he was in fact the unacknowledged true author of “Shakespeare’s” plays. The nuance is noted. Also in that illustrious line-up is Inigo Jones, the first English architect to export classical architecture and Palladianism to Britian.

In this work there is genuine desire both to exhort an older culture and to map the possibility that the main means of important cultural exchange between Italy and England in the early modern period was through journal writing. It does so much more than this, however, as it is not merely a literary and historical monograph but sees itself as a modern guide. Early journal accounts, in other words, are the historical paratexts to any modern journey, or to the putative new journal writing which may articulate a diarist’s experience. In similar terms the original itinerarium should be seen as a metatext, in the sense that it is the trunk from which so many other writings, diaries and revisions inevitably branch out over time. An exciting prospect would be to put to test this work as a guide - and of course as a method of time-travel - on one’s visit to Vicenza.

It is a joy to be able to read first-hand experiences, in the first person, untouched by presupposition. There is a sense in these narratives of a world moving more slowly, and of tourists whose slower speed of travel results in fuller immersion in their environments. There is the sense too of early travel for pleasure, accompanied by a genuine curiosity about the way other people live. From there, it is following in the footsteps, either literally or through the written word, that we are encouraged to do by this work, though to do so through the lens of that earlier world. By doing so early modern travellers’ experiences of finding meaning in the experience of other worlds and cultures can be seen and understood in their historical context and geographical setting. 

This work is important on a number of levels: to the history of travel and its writings, in mapping the interchange of ideas in art, architecture, and literature; and in helping us gain a sense of the contemporary reception, perception and transmission of flowering cultural values and ideas. Vicenza has been written with a passion for its subject matter. It has a palpable ethos to it. It was an immense project to research, in finding, editing and in bringing together so many journal narratives and to consolidate them into a chronicle whose linearity is at once so accessible and absorbing. That ethos is about scholarship for its own sake and brings life to voices from the past at a time when reading and writing has in many cases switched from personal reflection and documentation to less enquiring, more self-conscious and rather self-promoting platforms.

The Early Tourists’ Guide to Italy: Vicenza is the first in a planned series of volumes. The authors are currently preparing their next for publication, which will be on Venice.

Dr David Moses, Assistant Head 6th Form