Cicerone GT
Cicerone GT reworks the eighteenth century Grand Tour, once a journey for young, upper class men seeking culture and refinement. That circuit still shapes tourism today, drawing millions of visitors from across the world to the same sites.
Cheryl Brenda Green and I took a similar route on a holiday. We weren’t retracing the Tour. Italy was where we happened to go.
The photographs followed the trip, not the other way round, a motorhome standing in for the carriage.
Cheryl is a constant presence, a traveller and a partner. The viewer sees the journey through her, not simply at her.
Each place forms a diptych, washing lines and service stations set beside temples and monuments, the ordinary next to the spectacle. The diptych holds both at once: an ordinary holiday, and a route loaded with history. Neither cancels the other out.
Where the eighteenth century traveller sought mastery through seeing, and the tourist gaze that came with it, this work turns to endurance, companionship and return.
It asks what travel still means when images of the world already surround us, and whether it can carry meaning at all in an age built on speed and exhaustion.
Springfield Close, Andover
Andover was a coaching stop on the route from London to the West Country, where horses were changed and travellers rested before continuing towards Exeter and Cornwall.
West Ham United Football Club, London Stadium, London
Stratford lay far outside any Grand Tour route. The ground has its own history, once the site of Stratford Langthorne Abbey, one of England’s largest Cistercian monasteries until its dissolution in 1538.
Gotthard Motorway Service Area, Schattdorf
The Gotthard Pass was one of the high Alpine crossings into Italy, its dramatic scenery and treacherous going drawing both Grand Tourists and naturalists; before proper roads existed, carriages were dismantled and carried over the summit by mule.
The Monument to Fallen Partisans, Bologna
Bologna was a regular stop on the Grand Tour, prized for its university, the oldest in Europe and for the teaching hospitals and anatomical theatres that drew physicians and scholars from across the continent.
Camping Village Bellamare, Porto Recanati
Porto Recanati was a working fishing port with no place on the Grand Tourist’s map; its life as a seaside resort developed only in the 20th century.
The Basilica Cattedrale Maria Santissima Assunta, Trani
Trani lies in Apulia, a region absent from the earliest Grand Tour guidebooks. 18th century itineraries rarely extended south of Naples, leaving much of the south off the traveller’s map.
Spiaggia Libera – Le Due Sorelle, Torre dell’Orso
Salento, the southernmost tip of Apulia, lay further beyond the Grand Tourist’s world; its coastline had no place in the guidebooks that shaped where 18th-century travellers went.
The Basilica della Santa Casa, Loreto
Loreto has drawn travellers since the 13th century to the Santa Casa, a house said to have been carried from Nazareth by angels and venerated as the Virgin Mary’s own home; its basilica, built to enclose the relic, was itself an object of pilgrimage and architectural interest well into the Grand Tour era.
The Fontana Greca, Gallipoli
Gallipoli lay far south of any Grand Tour itinerary; by the 17th and 18th centuries it was known instead as a major centre of the olive oil trade.
Agricampeggio & Glamping Torre Sabea, Gallipoli
A campsite on the outskirts of Gallipoli, in a stretch of countryside with no historical claim on the traveller’s map.
The Herakleia Archaeological Park, Policoro
Herakleia was a major Greek city on the Gulf of Taranto, and Magna Graecia’s temples drew increasing attention from Grand Tourists later in the 18th century; but this site remained undiscovered and the surrounding plain nearly deserted well into the following century.
The Church of San Cataldo, Palermo
Sicily entered the Grand Tour later than the Italian mainland, drawing increasing numbers of travellers south of Naples in search of ancient Greek remains; Palermo itself was a first port of call, most famously for Goethe, who arrived by sea in 1787 and called Sicily “the key to everything.”
The Ruderi di Cirella, Diamante
Calabria lay beyond where most Grand Tourists ventured; its poor roads and reputation for banditry meant travellers bound for Sicily typically bypassed it by sea rather than crossing overland.
The Archaeological Park of Paestum, Cilento
Paestum’s Greek temples, rediscovered by travellers in the 1740s, caused a sensation among the Grand Tourists of the later 18th century. Their stark Doric forms went on to shape the Neoclassical taste that travellers carried home.
The Archaeological Park of Herculaneum, Ercolano
Herculaneum’s rediscovery in 1738 was a revelation across Europe, offering Grand Tourists their first glimpse of intact ancient Roman life; excavation was tightly controlled by the Bourbon crown throughout the century, and the site became one of the principal reasons travellers pushed south to Naples.
The Piazza del Plebiscito, Naples
Naples was the essential destination of the Grand Tour, the traditional endpoint before travellers pressed on to Sicily; but the piazza’s grand open colonnade and basilica were built only in the early 19th century, after the classic era of the Tour had already passed.
Camping Internazionale Castelfusano, Lido di Ostia
The nearby ruins of Ostia Antica drew occasional excursions from scholarly travellers based in Rome; the pine forest was, throughout the Grand Tour era, a private hunting estate belonging first to the Sacchetti family and then, from the 18th century, to the Chigi.
The Colosseum, Rome
The Colosseum was essential viewing for every Grand Tourist reaching Rome, endlessly sketched, painted, and etched by the artists who worked alongside travellers; Piranesi’s prints of its ruins were among the most sought-after souvenirs of the entire Tour.
The Piazza del Campo, Siena
Siena lay on the principal road between Florence and Rome, the two essential poles of any Italian tour, and travellers passed through the city and its shell-shaped medieval square.
The Gallerie Degli Uffizi, Florence
The Uffizi was essential viewing on the Grand Tour, its collection of antique sculpture and Renaissance painting central to the connoisseurship the whole journey was meant to cultivate; young travellers studied there under a tutor’s guidance, taking home the experience as proof of the education the Tour was meant to provide.
The Renaissance Walls, Lucca
Lucca lay on the Tuscan road between Florence and Pisa, well within a traveller’s reach; but its walls, still functioning fortifications throughout the Grand Tour era, were only transformed into a public walkway after 1815, once their military purpose had ended.
Riomaggiore, Cinque Terre
Riomaggiore lay beyond the Grand Tourist’s reach altogether, cut off by cliffs and sea, with no road connection into the village until the 20th century.
Camping Rapallo, Rapallo
Rapallo was a fortified Genoese fishing town with no claim on the Grand Tour; its life as a resort began only after the railway arrived in the later 19th century.
The Palazzo Brignole Sale, Genoa
Genoa was a principal sea gateway into Italy for Grand Tourists arriving from Marseille; the Palazzo Rosso, built by the Brignole Sale family in the 1670s, was listed among the city’s official Rolli, the register of noble houses set aside to host distinguished visitors according to their rank.
Antonio Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo office, 5 Via dell’Arcivescovado, Turin
Turin was often the first Italian city a Grand Tourist saw, the point where carriages, dismantled to cross Mont Cenis, were reassembled after the descent; the Savoy capital’s own elegance and courtly manners made it a natural place to pause before continuing south.
The Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
Milan lay on the road between the Alpine passes and Venice or Florence, and was known to Grand Tourists chiefly as a staging point. The Brera building housed an art academy founded in 1776, but the public gallery itself opened only in 1809, assembled from art seized under Napoleon as the Tour era was ending.
The Palace of Versailles, Paris
Paris was the Grand Tourist’s first great stop after crossing the Channel, a place to acquire French manners, language, and fashion; Versailles was visited from there as an essential excursion, a chance to witness the ceremony and splendour of the French court firsthand.
The White Cliffs, Dover
Dover was the customary point of departure and return for Grand Tourists crossing the Channel to Calais, the first and last English ground seen on the whole journey.