Department
Dispatches from the road, stop by stop along the old Grand Tour: what the travellers came to see, and what is still standing there today.
For two centuries the Venus de' Medici was the thing you crossed Europe to see. Today most people walk past it on the way to the Botticellis. Either our ancestors were wrong, or we are, and both possibilities are more interesting than they sound.
Grand Tourists crossed the Alps at Mont Cenis in a chair carried by strangers, with their carriage in pieces on the backs of mules, and most of them thought the scenery was hideous. Fifty years later the same view was the most sublime thing on earth. What changed?
Every traveller from the north came into Rome through the same gate. Goethe came through it on an October evening in 1786, under a false name, and finally let himself believe he'd made it.