A World Made by Travel

Thousands of northern Europeans traveled to Italy in the eighteenth century for a journey of cultural and symbolic capital called the Grand Tour. These travels were a formative institution of modernity, contributing to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, of ideas about leisure, and of professional practices. A World Made by Travel makes public the work of the Grand Tour Project, transforming more than five thousand entries from the 1997 Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy 1701-1800, compiled by John Ingamells from the Brinsley Ford Archive, into a dynamic research resource about these travelers’ journeys and lives.

A World Made by Travel includes access to an interactive database — its raw data and documentation; chapters on the project’s history, rationale and meaning; a collection of original essays produced by scholars working with the Grand Tour Explorer, as well as resources to bring this material to the classroom. This work shows the historical significance of eighteenth-century travel to Italy, and its continuing influence, in a new light and with unprecedented granularity, and it showcases the possibilities of digital history approaches for producing original research while making these new approaches accessible to researchers, students, and the general public.