From ‘Grand Tour of Europe’ by Kevin McCloud

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour - The term "Grand Tour" refers to the 17th- and 18th-century custom of a traditional trip of Europe undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a chaperon, such as a family member) when they had come of age (about 21 years old). …….. the Grand Tour was primarily associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry……]

Historically, visitor’s didn’t even come to France for the food: it was oily, garlicky, over-spiced and over-sauced and frog’s legs were viewed as a poor substitute for good, honest Protestant roast beef. They came instead for a crash course in Continental culture at the first stop on foreign soil and an opportunity to acquire the requisite manners and appearance for entry into foreign courts.

Built by Henri IV from 1605 to 1612 to designs probably by Baptiste du Cerceau, the Place des Vosges represented a concerted effort to create coherent cosmopolitan splendor in a city that was generally claustrophobic, chaotic and cramped. This was the first formal square as we know it with terraces of identical houses on four sides. It was built for the Parisian nobility, who had always resided in country chateaux or ‘hotels’ (private houses) scattered throughout the city ……In a radical departure from the norm the thirty-eight houses were all built to the same design ……..the Place …..architecturally it put Paris on the map. ……..the square ……it is a true square – represents the city’s first real attempt at town planning and was the prototype for countless city squares across Europe…the square’s uncanny resemblance to Covent Garden Plaza…..

……..farm-produced Parmesan cheese, which is one of the world’s finest ……Parmezan, as it is known – or Parmigiano Reggiano – is the pride of Parma and the surrounding area. …..In the medieval allegorical work The Decameron, thought to have been written between 1350 and 1353, the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio dreams of ‘a mountain of grated Parmesan cheese on top of which there were people who did nothing but make macaroni and ravioli’. The playwright Moliere begged for a chunk of it on his deathbed. Napoleon was a big fan and Samuel Pepys famously buried his Parmesan in the garden to protect it from the Great Fire of London……it was a costly indulgence for English gourmands.

Its appeal lies in its unique flavor – deemed to embody ‘umami’, the so-called fifth or ‘savoury’ taste……..It is also pretty unique among cheeses as one that consumes all the lactose from the curds and so its acceptable to those with lactose-intolerant stomachs.

……..Vicenza, an extraordinary city……..

Venice was variously described by visitors as ‘a stinkpot, charged with the very virus of hell’, ‘more noisome than a pigstye’ and ‘cursed by nauseous air’. The dirt and stench was overwhelming – the shit, piss, cooked food and dead animals were not collected by night soil men but dumped in the canal to be hopefully swept out to sea or collected by inland farmers for fertilizer. But to most British tourists the real source of astonishment was the air of moral abandonment and casual depravity.

In 1358 the Great Council of Venice declared prostitution to be ‘absolutely indispensable to the world’……..Thomas Coryat put the number of courtesans there in the early seventeenth century at 20,000…….

Florence, Firenze, the flowering city, may be the cradle of all that is noble and cultured in the Western world, but only because it was one of the world’s great capitalist cities. ……..no Grand Tourist could fail to be amazed by one building in Florence – one towering structure that dwarfs all others and still dominates the city – the dome of the cathedral. The Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore (St Mary of the Flower) was begun in the thirteenth century by city fathers ………At the time they were confident that someone would develop the technology to span the huge hole in the roof, but by 1400 nobody had – until Filippo Brunelleschi stepped up to the challenge…….It is still the largest masonry dome ever built …….It delivered an engineering masterpiece which was to inspire both Michaelangelo’s St Peter’s and Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s. …… Brunelleschi’s dome was not just a technological wonder; its size and height make it visible for miles, even from surrounding cities. …..the Duomo’s superdome gave Florence a giant personality. Almost a century later……..it was Michaelangelo who defined the essence of contemporary Florence. Firstly with his statue of David – a High-Renaissance hero on a truly colossal scale – and then with the Medici Chapel…..Commissioned at the end of the 1400s by the Medici family, the wealthiest and most powerful of the wealthy bankers who climbed out of the Florence power-cradle to become rulers and popes, the Medici Chapel is extraordinary, both architecturally and as a statement of power. ….. Where Brunelleschi’s dome was a symbol of Church and State, the Medici dome was all about the enforcement of a dynasty and unabashed personal power. And there are many that have found and continue to find such personal architectural statements offensive.

…….most Grand Tourists were simply smelly. After weeks spent travelling in a crowded carriage in the summer heat the baths must have been a godsend. This was before the days of deodorant, and opportunities to bathe en route were few and far between. Travelers had to resort to wiping their armpits, groin and teeth with a coarse linen cloth doused in vinegar – the antiseptic of yesteryear…..

Rome …….Pope Sixtus V and his architect Carlo Fontana had laid out streets and boulevards in the 1580s…….In the 1530s just 30,000 people inhabited a city built for a million, leaving space aplenty for the popes to implement their extraordinary vision for a new Papal City on an epic scale………..If you want to remodel a city, a fire that destroy’s 13,000 buildings clearly isn’t enough. You need a city which is empty, as Rome was. It also helps if you’ve got a despotic monarch or emperor as Paris has had in its time. Or best of all, a pope. We hardly ever got it right in Britain because our cities weren’t laid out by despots – and they hadn’t been laid aside to crumble for a thousand years. They were busy vital places that had grown from villages and towns and it was hard to reinvent them in any other than their sprawling form, grown as they had on principles of the free market and freehold ownership. The only real exceptions are Bath and Edinburgh – eighteenth century model towns laid out on a truly grand scale and done so on huge speculative scales.  ……..Presiding over all this papal splendor were two magnificent epic domes – the Pantheon and St Peter’s – and the tiny, but equally perfect, Tempietto.

Although the Pantheon, the most famous dome in the world, has been converted into a church, no amount of Christianizing it can hide the fact that it is powerful, primal, and pagan – and does anything but make one feel virtuous. It is gigantic and mysterious, like it was created by devils – and was indeed known as the House of Devils at the height of the Grand Tour. Renaissance thinkers believed it had been constructed by demons, not humans, such is its scale. ……The oculus – the hole in the Pantheon’s roof – is as wide as a three-storey house is high. ……the tiny but famous tin-pot Tempietto, built by Bramante, the first architect of St Peter’s in the early sixteenth century. It has been called the most perfect building in the world.

……….the Temple of Vesta, an unusual (at least to the eighteenth century eye) circular building composed of columns.

The temple sits above the wide plain of the Campagna, beyond Rome, a plain with a rich history…….The temple itself is an exquisite Corinthian edifice and it seduced and inspired countless visitors…..the celebrated view of the Temple of Vesta was (and still is) magnificent…..

…….remodelling swathes of British landscape, is exactly what inspired young aristos like Henry Hoare II, the son of a wealthy banker, who ……..created in the 1740s one of the most idyllic landscapes in the world on his family estate at Stourhead…..created a 100-acre fictional paradise. He damned the River Stout to form a great lake, directed his gardeners in the art of ‘painterly’ landscaping, and generally proved just how much effort was needed to get the natural look……..It is still there, the first English attempt at a 3-D reproduction of a Claude painting, replete with temples, a bridge, grottoes and a lake. Every device needed for a re-enactment of any scene from classical mythology, and still today, in my view, one of the most exquisite pieces of landscape design ever carried out.

Hadrian’s Villa is perhaps the greatest rural palace of Antiquity. Built between AD 118 and 128 by the Emperor Hadrian, it was a dazzling assortment of thirty or more buildings on a 300-acre site, with the hills of Tivoli as a scenic backdrop. Much of the architecture was inspired by monuments elsewhere in Hadrian’s vast empire, particularly in Egypt and Greece. It was constructed and staffed by thousands of slaves.

Robert Adam….found perhaps the most useful and inspirational ideas at Hadrian’s Villa. Here, as at the Emperor Diocletian’s Palace at Split, which he visited ………are the expressive ideas that he was able to import to Britain, market and promote to huge success …….Adam hoovered these ideas up and presented them in a new coherent style of design and decoration that we still marvel at today and associate, more than any other style of building, with the great English Country House.

The area around the Bay of Naples has been a magnet for the rich and famous since the days of Ancient Rome…….As you might expect from a population which has spent thousands of years at the mercy of a capricious volcano, the inhabitants of Naples were, and are, astonishingly superstitious…….many Neapolitans lived – and still live – in abject poverty. In the eighteenth century, of a total population of 300,000 an estimated 40,000 were lazzari – a tight-knit class of paupers who survived on the streets, picking pockets for a living…….

Until the mid-eighteenth century almost nobody went to Greece. It was part of the Ottoman Empire and was not an easy and safe place for the Western traveler……….

Lord Elgin’s misdemeanours. His most audacious act, the ‘liberation’ of the Elgin marbles……..Elgin oversaw the removal of countless Antique treasures, including around half of the surviving sculptures in the Parthenon. And he destroyed parts of the building in the process………Elgin claimed the moral high ground, arguing that his actions were designed to preserve the ruins from mismanagement by the Turks and to ‘improve British taste’…….The legality – and moral probity – of Elgin’s actions remains in dispute. The New Acropolis Museum contains an empty room awaiting their eventual return. …….

Greece is cursed with few forests and blessed with much good marble.

Set in verdant pinewoods with commanding views of the sea, the Temple of Aphaia exemplified the Greek approach to the site. Where Roman architecture was more urban, its external expression often amounting to little more than a single façade, the Greeks conceived their temples as three-dimensional objects in the landscape. Imposing from every angle, they were placed on mountain tops, between symmetrical hills, in valleys, and on mounds, depending on which god or goddesses they represented.

The cave on Antiparos in the Cyclades Islands in the middle of the Aegean Sea was one of many natural wonders ……….a truly astonishing site. The oldest stalagmite in Europe, thought to be 45 million years old, marked the entrance to a cave which burrowed down into the rock for a 100 metres or so, leading to an underworld fairyland of rock formations and stalactites……the cave had, in fact, been famous for over two millennia…….

The inevitable and dreaded part of every Grand Tour involved crossing the Alps, via any one of a number of high passes: the French Petit or Grand St Bernard Pass, the pass via Mont Cenis or a variety of routes through Switzerland………Chamonix opened its first guest house in 1770 and by 1783 it was receiving around 1,500 visitors each summer…….the first luxury hotel was built in 1816….

……..St Gotthard’s Pass. One of the most famous and dramatic of the Alpine passes…..English mineralogist Edward Daniel Clarke….tourists were still a rarity when he took the Gotthard route from Basel to Turin in 1793.

Wordsworth……..his description of crossing the Simplon Pass, which appears in Book VI of his autobiographical magnum opus The Prelude, is one of the finest things he wrote.

….the construction of Europe’s first mountain railway, from Vitznau to Rigi, in 1871, followed by the Arth to Rigi railway in 1875, transformed Alpine tourism……..

….the legendary Mount rigi sunrise, which was – and remains – the highlight of Thomas Cook’s Alpine tours.

……St Pancras Station: a cathedral of steel attached to a masterpiece of Gothic architecture……..constructed in 1868 by the engineer William Henry Barlow, the train-shed boasted the largest single-span structure to have been built at the time, and was a miracle of Victorian engineering.

………..one of the most exciting and influential buildings of the eighteenth century turned out to be James Gibbs’ Gothic Pavilion at Stowe…………