A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800 Compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive John Ingamells

This remarkable dictionary identifies over six thousand British and Irish travellers who toured in Italy in the eighteenth century. Compiled from the celebrated archive accumulated by Sir Brinsley Ford, this volume provides brief formal biographies of these travellers, their Italian itineraries, and selective accounts of their experiences as described in contemporary sources.

While the majority of travellers were young persons making the grand tour -- discovering antiquity, the temptations of a brisk and irregular art market, the squalor and the riches of Italian life and travel -- there were also many older visitors intent on some professional purpose, and over three hundred artists, sculptors, architects, and British antiquaries who became guides or art dealers in Rome or Naples. And, there were those who sought a warmer climate for their health, disconsolate Jacobites who gathered round the exiled Stuart court in Rome, and unsettled eccentrics, bankrupts, and misfits. Some figures in the dictionary may be familiar, such as diplomats Horace Mann and William Hamilton or restless spirits Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Fourth Earl of Bristol (Bishop of Derry), but much of the information is less well known, drawn from archive material in Great Britain, Ireland, and Italy.