The New Grand Tour of Italy

« Un homme qui n’est jamais allé en Italie éprouve toujours un sentiment d’infériorité. » C’est ce qu’écrivait Samuel Johnson, non sans une certaine envie, dans les années 1770, à une époque où l’Italie occupait une place centrale dans l’imaginaire européen. Johnson n’y est jamais allé, contrairement à son contemporain allemand Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, qui quitta son pays dix ans plus tard et mit le cap vers le sud, en quête de culture. Le récit qu’il en a tiré, Voyage en Italie, s’est imposé comme le témoignage de référence du Grand Tour. L’objectif de ce voyage : forger les esprits. Les jeunes aristocrates suivaient son itinéraire à la lettre et en revenaient transformés, avec des goûts plus raffinés, l’esprit plus ouvert, les mains chargées de tableaux réalisés sur commande et avec une nouvelle façon de voir le monde.

Le Grand Tour n'est plus d'actualité, mais son évolution a été des plus heureuses. Ce qui constituait autrefois un rite de passage de plusieurs années est désormais à la portée de quiconque souhaite s'y lancer. La liste des sites à visiter s'est également assouplie, laissant le voyageur libre de suivre son instinct, à l'instar de Goethe. Il peut ainsi se rendre là où le présent se construit, tout autant que là où le passé a été préservé. Aujourd’hui, notre voyage nous emmène de Milan à Florence et Rome, et commence, comme par le passé, dans le nord de l'Italie…

Milan : la porte d'entrée

Milan, qui était la première étape italienne du Grand Tour après la traversée des Alpes, reste la ville la plus avant-gardiste du pays. Les trésors historiques continuent d'exercer leur attrait : La Cène de Léonard de Vinci à Santa Maria delle Grazie, les flèches de marbre du Duomo et la Pietà Rondanini au château des Sforza, dernière œuvre réalisée par Michel-Ange. Les lieux de pèlerinage modernes sont tout aussi intéressants.

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.

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.