Grand Tour Project

In the eighteenth century, thousands of Northern Europeans traveled to Italy for a journey of cultural and symbolic capital they called the Grand Tour.

These travels were a formative institution of modernity, contributing to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, the market for culture, ideas about leisure, and the practices of professionalism. Since 2008, the Grand Tour Project (grandtour.stanford.edu) has used and generated digital tools, analysis, and visualizations to bring us closer to the diverse travelers, elite and otherwise, who collectively represent eighteenth-century travel to Italy. We have been digitizing and enhancing the Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy 1701-1800 to create a searchable database of more than six thousand entries and visualizations cataloguing the journeys and lives of those who made the Grand Tour. We are now working towards the public release of this interactive database with an accompanying digital volume of explanatory essays.

Visit the project website