Visitors to Verona

Lovers, Gentlemen and Adventurers

Caroline Webb

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784536473
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720801
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Even before the advent of mass tourism, Verona was a popular destination for travellers, including those undertaking the popular 'Grand Tour' across Europe. In this book, Caroline Webb compares the experiences of travellers from the era of Shakespeare to the years following the incorporation of the Veneto into the new kingdom of Italy in 1866. She considers their reasons for visiting Verona as well as their experiences and expectations once they arrived. The majority of English visitors between 1670 and 1760 were young members of the aristocracy, accompanied by tutors, who arrived on their way to or from Rome, as part of a 'Grand Tour' intended to 'finish' their classical education. With the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the resultant increasing wealth of the upper middle classes, the number of visitors to Verona increased although this tourism was derailed once Napoleon invaded Italy in the late 1790s. After 1815 and the allied victory at Waterloo there was a new flood of visitors, previously deprived of the opportunity of continental travel during the Napoleonic wars.
As the nineteenth century progressed, especially with the arrival of the railway, an increasing number of visitors appeared from across Europe and even from across the Atlantic, keen to explore the fabled city of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In comparing a myriad of varied accounts, this book provides an unrivalled perspective on the history of one of Italy's most seductive cities.

   CHAPTER 1

The Aims of Travel

The degree of preparation necessary for travelling depends upon the motives which induce us to travel. He who goes from home merely to change the scene and to see for novelty; who makes amusement his sole object […] has no need of mental preparation for his excursion.¹

The Reverend John Eustace, 1815

FOR THE ENGLISH, Italy always held the lure of the classical world, with memories of ancient Rome strong in the minds of those who had been educated in Latin and Greek at Oxford or Cambridge. From the Middle Ages onward English scholars had attended universities such as Bologna, Pavia or Padua, while other travellers had made their way to Rome on pilgrimage. In the years after the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the ensuing hostility between Catholic and Protestant in Europe, travel by Englishmen became more complicated, with a visit to Italy becoming suspect because of the perceived dangers of exposure to Catholicism. This resulted in warnings about the dangers to young Englishmen from Italian travel, well summarized by Roger Ascham in 1570 in The Scholemaster. He declared that not only would they encounter papistry, but they would also be influenced by the perceived bad habits of Italians, bringing back with them ‘varietie of vanities, and chaunge of filthy living’. For him, an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate: Inglese Italianato e un diabolo incarnato.² The idea of Italy as a danger, particularly for religious and political reasons, was one that lingered on in the minds of the English for many years.

It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that increasing numbers of young men from upper-class English families went on what became known as the classical Grand Tour, accompanied by their tutors or ‘bear leaders’. Writing earlier in the sixteenth century, the philosopher and politician Francis Bacon had already given some positive advice to a nobleman about the aims and benefits of travelling abroad.

Your Lordship’s purpose is to travel, and your study must be what use to make of your travel […] you shall have great help to attain to knowledge, which is not only the excellentest thing in man, but the very excellency of man.

This study should extend to knowledge of the country to be visited and the people therein, ‘their buildings, their furnitures, their entertainments, all their husbandry and ingenious inventions in whatsoever concerneth either pleasure or profit’.³

So the aim of travel was to learn more, but there were dangers to be avoided. A young man should not be ‘given to affectation (a general fault in most of our English travellers), which is both displeasing and ridiculous’. He should profit by association with the best of the local people, and ‘restrain your affection and participation from your own countrymen of whatever condition’.⁴ This was general advice directed to any visitor to Europe, but was particularly pertinent to Italy, a country very much the focus of travel from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards because of its classical associations.

It was not just young aristocrats in search of the ancient world who went to Italy. There were two Englishmen visiting Verona around 1600 who were driven, rather, by simple curiosity and a desire to see the world. For Thomas Coryat, an early English traveller and author, ‘Of all the pleasures in the world travell is (in my opinion) the sweetest and most delightfull.’⁵ This was because he felt it enabled a man to see other countries, to meet other scholars and to learn new languages. A few years later Fynes Moryson, student, skilled linguist and inveterate traveller, declared that his intention was ‘to enable my understanding, which I thought could not be done so well by contemplation as by experience’.⁶

These two had clearly not been deterred by the perceived dangers of Italian travel, which were later enumerated by John Raymond, who went on the Grand Tour with his uncle in 1646–7. His Itinerary contayning a Voyage, sometimes described as the first comprehensive English guidebook to Italy, was an attempt to dispel the principal fears as Raymond saw them:

There are three evitable dangers that divert some from this Voyage; the first is the heates of the Climate; a second, that horrible (in Report) Inquisition; the last, Hazard of those merciless Out Lawes Banditas.

The first may be allayd by Moderation, the second prevented by Discretion; the last avoided by the defence of those States you pass through.⁷

Undeterred by such possible hazards, there were young Grand Tourists visiting Verona by the later seventeenth century. One such was John, 5th earl of Exeter, who visited Verona on his second trip to Italy in 1683–4, accompanied by his steward, Culpepper Tanner. James, 1st duke of Ormond, chose Francis Misson, a Protestant refugee from France, as tutor and guide to his grandson, Charles Butler, later earl of Arran. These two undertook their grand tour in 1687 and 1688, travelling to Italy over the Brenner Pass, and visiting Verona on the way to Venice. In 1691, Misson published an influential account of their trip which was translated into English as early as 1695; this work, A new voyage to Italy, has been described as ‘resoundingly modern, comprising the sequential exposition of first-hand factual observations, nonetheless augmented by the critical perspective of a protestant travelling through a Catholic country’.⁸

The early to middle years of the 1700s saw the peak of the Grand Tour phenomenon of young English aristocrats and their tutors spending months or even years visiting the principal classical sites in places such as Rome and Verona. Its aim, according to Thomas Nugent, Anglo-Irish traveller, translator and writer, was ‘to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgement, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word form the complete gentleman’.⁹ So, in the 1740s when Nugent was writing, the objectives of the Tour were still very much both instruction and development of character.

Since the education of such young men had been based largely on Latin and Greek, for their tutors the purpose of any Italian visit was to deepen their charges’ understanding of the Roman world. This would certainly involve visiting Rome itself with its impressive remains that included the Coliseum, the Forum and Trajan’s Column. It could also involve a visit to Verona, whose antiquities were perhaps not as notable, but were nevertheless varied and of great interest, particularly its Arena built in about AD 30 and in a fine state of preservation internally. In 1730, Alexander Gordon had published A complete history of the ancient amphitheatres, a translation of a treatise on the subject by the illustrious Veronese antiquarian, Scipione Maffei; this had helped to spread the fame of the Arena amongst English-speaking travellers.¹⁰

These well-born young Grand Tourists included Charles Sackville, eldest son of the duke of Dorset, who was in Italy from 1731 to 1733 with his tutor Joseph Spence, a clergyman and Oxford professor. They spent four or five days in Verona in November 1731 en route to Venice; in a letter home, Spence described how the first sight of the Roman Arena ‘strikes one with such an admiration that one does not care to speak for four or five minutes’.¹¹ On the other hand, those who had seen Rome first found Verona’s ruins of little consequence, as Marianne Colston, artist, author and traveller, noted later, in 1820. ‘We visited the celebrated Roman amphitheatre in this place; it is far inferior in magnitude, and (as well as we can now judge) in architectural beauty, to the noble Coliseum in Rome.’¹² Few other visitors were so dismissive, with most ready to admire the excellent state of preservation of the Arena’s interior, which contrasted with the more ruinous state of that of the Coliseum.

The Roman Catholic priest, The Reverend John Eustace, did not publish his influential guide A tour through Italy until 1813, but in it he still held the principal aims of the Grand Tour in mind. He gave perhaps the most succinct account of what ‘a man of a liberal and active mind’ should do before embarking on an Italian tour.¹³ He should be instructed in the works of Latin poets and historians as well as in Italian history from the time of the Romans onwards. He should have a general knowledge of the principles of architecture, sculpture and painting, as well as a sufficient knowledge of the Italian language, that ‘nothing may be wanting to complete his command of it but practice and conversation’.¹⁴ Finally, he should be of ‘an unprejudiced mind’.¹⁵ Eustace was harking back to the days when the classical past was the focus of Italian travel, but in fact the world of tourism was already changing in nature.

From the mid- to late eighteenth century onwards travel to Italy was becoming increasingly a middle-class activity, with visitors to Verona including businessmen, artists, writers and women. These people might well take in the classical sites deemed the most significant, such as the Arena in Verona, but they were also interested in other matters, such as the customs and characteristics of the Italians themselves, buildings to be found in Verona from later periods, designed by architects such as Michele Sanmicheli and – inevitably – the city’s Shakespearean connection with Romeo and Juliet. Many came to realize that Verona deserved more time than they had allowed. In 1820, for instance, Thomas Pennington and his party arrived in the city:

[…] our intention was to have proceeded on our journey on the following day, but this town is so interesting from its antiquities, and from its being celebrated by our immortal bard, that we held a council on the subject, and the result was, a determination to stay the next day, by which means we should have a day and a half here.¹⁶

Travel to the Continent was becoming easier, with steamships crossing the Channel by the 1820s, and railways being built from the 1840s onwards; this enabled more people on limited budgets to explore France and Italy. Travel was also much faster, resulting in tourists spending less time in each place, but visiting more of them. The political situation across Europe generally became much more secure after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, making the idea of travel to places like Verona or Venice more acceptable. Even those who were unable to travel enjoyed reading guidebooks: in the ten years from 1819, an average of seven travel books a year about Italy were published in Britain.¹⁷ Another source of interest and information was the publication of works illustrated with prints of foreign cities with their principal sights; these would have included the widely known Landscape annuals published in the 1830s and covering Italy, France and Switzerland.

Women travellers in particular commented in their letters and journals on the practical details of their journeys; these might be the comfort or otherwise of their lodgings, the state of the pavements or the works of art to be seen in public galleries. The growth of what might be called the guidebook industry was useful to women who often lacked the extensive classical education of their male counterparts but still wished to take full advantage of the opportunities now open to them. Some also wrote accounts of their travels that were tantamount to guidebooks, and which enjoyed considerable success. These included Hester Piozzi, married to an Italian musician, the author Mariana Starke and the Countess of Blessington, society beauty and friend of Byron. They were less likely to be didactic about recommending itineraries than, say, Murray’s Hand-book for travellers in Northern Italy of 1842 which stated firmly that ‘The principle of describing not what may be seen, but what ought to be seen has been strictly followed by the author of the present work […].’¹⁸

As Britain became an increasingly urban society in the nineteenth century, tourists displayed a particular interest in city life in Italy as well, which they could compare with their experiences at home. The range of city guidebooks now available was considerable, and the information they provided was bound to influence what tourists aimed to see, for instance, in Verona. One recent historian has described this development thus: ‘Guidebooks were powerfully constitutive of the experiences of sightseeing; they determined what was seen and in what order, and shaped what judgements were made.’¹⁹ Once a family had decided to visit Italy, the relevant guidebook could be studied at home before departure and, on arrival, the advice on essential places to visit could be followed, perhaps with the assistance of a cicerone or local guide. The resulting conformity is reflected in the accounts left by travellers, who repeatedly visited the same sights in Verona; it was a rare tourist who aimed to explore the back streets of the city.

Europeans, too, became more frequent visitors to Italy from the late eighteenth century onwards, often leaving accounts of their travels. The German author and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, for instance, had always wanted the opportunity to visit the country, and described his time in Verona in the 1780s with delight, showing a particular interest in the Veronesi and their way of life. French travellers in the 1830s included the indefatigable Antoine Pasquin, who visited almost every building in Verona, describing his researches in his guidebook. Travellers’ interests now extended to a wider range of sights in the city that included the fortifications and palazzi built by the Veronese architect Sanmicheli, the Gothic Scaligeri funeral monuments in Piazza dei Signori and the contents of the many local churches.

There were also many more American travellers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all seeking to explore Europe now that this was easier and more affordable. So far as Verona was concerned, most were intent on making their way to anything that could be linked with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but they also commented on many other features of the city’s life. So it was that changing opportunities for travel enabled tourists from across the world to come to a city that had much more to offer than classical sites such as the Roman Arena, and did not deserve in any way to be thought of as merely a stopping-off point on the way to or from Venice.

CHAPTER 2

The Practicalities of Travel

Map showing places of entry of visitors from the north ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Map of Verona
• Preface
• 1. The Aims of Travel
• 2. The Practicalities of Travel
• 3. Accommodation and Food in the City
• 4. L’Arena di Verona
• 5. Travellers’ Opinions of the City
• 6. The City’s Civic Architecture
• 7. The Veronesi
• 8. The French Occupation
• 9. The Austrian Occupation
• 10. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
• 11. Scipione Maffei
• 12. Verona’s Many Churches
• 13. San Zeno Maggiore
• 14. Religion through Tourists’ Eyes
• 15. The Scaligeri Monuments
• 16. Piazza delle Erbe
• 17. The Giusti Gardens
• 18. Local Artists and Aristocratic ‘Collections’
• 19. Music and Theatre
• 20. Matters of Health
• 21. Visitors’ Views on Local Agriculture and Industry
• 22. The Dress of Local People
• 23. English Views of the Italians
• Postscript
• Appendix 1. History of Verona Timeline
• Appendix 2. Biographical Notes
• Notes
• Bibliography