A letter home, and nothing to sell you in the middle of it.

In 1786 Goethe slipped out of Carlsbad before dawn, told almost nobody, and turned up in Rome under a false name. He spent the next two years writing letters home. They were later collected as the Italian Journey, and they are still the best travel writing we know: curious, exact, a little in love with everything, and never once trying to sell you anything.

That's the spirit of this place. We follow the old Grand Tour stop by stop, and we wander off it all the time: into the objects the travellers carried, the letters they folded and sealed, the science they argued about, and the rest of the world, which was busy with its own business the whole time.

A few house rules

Show the real thing. Every piece points at something you can actually look at: a building still standing on the street, an object in a museum case, a letter scanned and free online. The Go See It page collects them all.

No links for sale inside the letters. If we ever recommend a book or a hotel, it will be on a separate page, clearly labelled, and chosen because we'd send a friend there.

Old voices, quoted honestly. When we quote a traveller, it comes from a public-domain edition we name, and when we're paraphrasing, we say so.

Published when it's ready. Roughly weekly, but never padded to hit a schedule.