"A man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority." So penned a rather envious Samuel Johnson in the 1770s, when Italy was the great fever dream of the European imagination. Johnson never made it, unlike his German contemporary Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who slipped out of the country a decade later and pointed himself south in pursuit of culture. The record he kept, Italian Journey, became the defining account of the Grand Tour. Its purpose was formation. Young aristocratic men followed its schedule dutifully, and returned changed, their taste refined, their eyes opened, carrying commissioned canvases, and a way of seeing they had not possessed before.
The Grand Tour has had its day, in the most fortunate way. What was once a rite of years is now within reach of anyone with the curiosity to make it. The prescribed list of sights has loosened too, leaving the traveller free to follow Goethe's original instinct, to stand where the present is being made as well as where the past is preserved. Today, our journey through Milan, Florence and Rome begins, as it always did, in the north…
Milan: The Gateway
Milan was the Tour's first taste of Italy after the Alpine descent, and remains the country's most forward-looking city. The traditional draws hold their pull: Leonardo's Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie, the marble pinnacles of the Duomo, the Rondanini Pietà inside Sforza Castle, the last work Michelangelo touched. Modern pilgrimages reward equally.
South of the centre, the Fondazione Prada, Rem Koolhaas's art campus carved from a former gin distillery, repays a long afternoon among contemporary exhibitions and the bones of Milan's industrial past. Further out, Pirelli HangarBicocca, a converted locomotive factory, contains Anselm Kiefer's Seven Heavenly Palaces, seven leaning concrete towers drawn from Kabbalistic mysticism. Back in the heart of the city, the design quarter hums year-round, visit in April and the Salone del Mobile turns the whole place into an exhibition. Close by, The Carlton sits in the Quadrilatero della Moda, the four-street grid of Italian fashion where home-grown brands Prada, Armani and Versace show their collections.
Florence: The Long Pause
Leaving Milan, the journey continues south, the high-speed line cutting past Bologna and through the Apennines into Tuscany, a crossing the original tourists made over weeks. Hotel Savoy waits on Piazza della Repubblica, the Duomo and the Ponte Vecchio as its illustrious neighbours, making it the natural base for exploring the birthplace of the Renaissance.
Florence was the Tour's first long pause, where the eye was schooled before the culmination of Rome. The Tribuna of the Uffizi, the octagonal room the Medici built for their finest pieces, is the same Goethe may have walked into in 1786, the Botticellis hanging a few rooms along. Florence has never stopped making new things, and the contemporary side of the city shows it. Palazzo Strozzi, a fifteenth-century palace a short walk from the hotel, has lately displayed the work of Anish Kapoor and Jeff Koons beneath its arches. Across the Arno, the 1930s Rationalist tobacco factory of Manifattura Tabacchi is a sprawling creative quarter; it’s easy to spend an afternoon wandering between artists' studios or browsing the contemporary canvases at the VEDA gallery.
Johnson, Samuel
"A man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority."
Rome: The Culmination
Ninety minutes further south through the hills of Tuscany and Umbria, the dome of St Peter's rises on the horizon and Rome appears, the beautiful conclusion of the tour. What the Grand Tourists came to see is almost all still here. The Vatican, the Forum, the Pantheon. Caravaggio's canvases in the chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi he painted them for, Bernini's marbles in the rooms at the Galleria Borghese where they were first installed.
In an eighteenth-century palazzo above the Spanish Steps, Hotel de la Ville sits just a few doors from where the engraver Piranesi lived, his Roman views the souvenir every traveller took home. The quarter was once thick with aristocratic visitors and today, the hotel's rooftop Cielo bar opens onto the same skyline they would have sketched.
Modern Rome is layered onto the ancient. Across the Tiber, Zaha Hadid's MAXXI, the city's first home for contemporary art, curves through the Flaminio district in white concrete streams, showcasing Richter, Kentridge and the Italian Arte Povera masters within. Nearby, Renzo Piano's Auditorium Parco della Musica presents three monumental halls, each a giant scarab shaped to function as a musical instrument, around a 3,000-seat open-air amphitheatre. The remains of a Roman villa, unearthed during construction, sit preserved within the complex.
The instinct behind the Grand Tour was the desire to be changed by what one saw. That has not altered. What the modern traveller carries home is still what first drove a restless poet over the Alps: a craving to have stood at the beating heart of all things exquisite.
Begin your own Grand Tour at Hotel Savoy in Florence, Hotel de la Ville in Rome or The Carlton in Milan.
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