Book-Buying and the Grand Tour: the Italian Books at Belton House in Lincolnshire

Abstract

ritish gentlemen who went on tour to Continental Europe in the early modern period were famously acquisitive: numerous studies have charted the arrival in the British Isles of goods from the Grand Tour. Furniture, artworks, fashion, foodstuffs, and other items both large and small were painstakingly packed and carried across the Continent to adorn the town and country residences of the English aristocracy. 1 Italy was a particularly fertile source of acquisitions. In his general history of the Grand Tour, Christopher Hibbert provides an extensive list of the souvenirs that the average tourist would attempt to obtain in the major Italian cities: books of prints, medals, maps, paintings and copies of paintings at Rome, as well as scent, pomatums, bergamot, imperial oil, and acqua di millefiori; snuff-boxes and silk from Venice; glasses from Murano; swords, canes, soap and rock-crystal from Milan; mosaics of dendrite, and amber, musk and myrrh from Florence; point lace, sweet-meats and velvet from Genoa; snuff and sausages from Bologna; firearms from Brescia; milled gloves from Turin; masks from Modena; spurs and toys from Reggio nell'Emilia. 2 Hibbert points out that the acquisition of specific items in specific locations was often recommended by the eighteenth-century guidebooks, and slavishly followed by tourists as they made their way north en route for home.