The Original Eurotrip: How the Grand Tour Shaped Generations of 19th-Century Elites

There are almost always tour buses lined up outside my favorite attraction in Rome. When I walk down Via Caio Cestio to the Cimitero Acattolico, also known as the Cemetery for Non-Catholic Foreigners or simply the Protestant Cemetery, I often see them parked bumper-to-bumper. But no tourists ever emerge from those buses. That narrow side street running along the north wall of the cemetery simply happens to be a designated parking zone for empty charters. Despite its location next to the impressive two-thousand-year-old Pyramid of Cestius, the Protestant Cemetery is not a major tourist draw.

Perhaps it’s because death can be a hard sell, but it’s more likely the result of a happy promotional fluke—the cemetery falls just off the bottom of the free tourist map handed out by most Roman hotels, like my home base of Hotel Orlanda. Whatever the reason, the cemetery is the better for it. The sublime serenity of this urban oasis might not survive the kind of popularity that afflicts Trevi Fountain or Piazza Navona.

There are two sections to the cemetery. The eastern sector, closer to the pyramid, is relatively wide open, dotted with benches where visitors can admire the steep, marble-clad concrete pyramid built as the tomb of prominent Roman Caius Cestius just a few years before the birth of Christ.

At the time Egypt and its perfidious Queen Cleopatra had recently been vanquished and this triumph set off a mania for all things Egyptian. The Pyramid of Cestius was an imitative product of this Egyptian craze in the first century BCE, a little like the replica Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas. Still, the Vegas Eiffel is unlikely to be quite so durable an attraction—two thousand years later the Roman pyramid remains a dramatic sight. In fact, it once seemed to observers too big a deal for a mere rich Roman official. By the Middle Ages the inscriptions with Caius Cestius’s name had been obscured from view and it was widely believed the pyramid was actually the tomb of Romulus and Remus, legendary wolf-suckled founders of Rome.

The western sector of the Protestant Cemetery is more densely packed with row upon row of markers over the graves of a remarkably wide array of foreigners, including at least one Confederate officer and a former Canadian ambassador. The famous Angel of Grief memorial created by sculptor William Wetmore Story for his wife Emelyn in 1894 is here. Revolutionary philosopher Antonio Gramsci lies here, his grave often graced with fresh flowers left by admirers. Stray cats, well-fed by volunteers, saunter among the headstones and the flowering trees. The quiet beauty of this enclave, located right beside a busy Roman intersection, seems otherworldly.

By Roman standards the Protestant Cemetery is a relatively modern creation. It dates back a few hundred years, believed to have been created for the benefit of the exiled Stuart court of England. In 1719 James Francis Edward Stuart, son of the deposed King James II, set up housekeeping in Rome while he waited in vain to reclaim the throne of Great Britain from Hanoverian usurpers. Prominent though they were, some of these Stuart loyalists were Protestant and thus could not be buried in consecrated ground alongside good Roman Catholics. A new graveyard was needed. Despite the noble status of the Stuart hangers-on, their ultimate destination was nonetheless intended as a ghetto of the damned.

The Protestant Cemetery began doing a brisk business as the final resting place for non-Catholics of every sort. Among its graves are those of young men who came to Rome on the grand tour, never to depart. Chief among the cemetery’s pilgrimage sites are the graves of English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, two friends interred too young in 1821 and 1822 respectively.

Keats is buried in the more spacious eastern section, facing the pyramid. “It might make one in love with death, to think that one might be buried in so sweet a place,” Shelley wrote upon visiting. When Shelley drowned after a shipwreck off La Spezia just a year after Keats’s death, his tribute to Keats, Adonais, seemed to serve as an epitaph for them both. “Go thou to Rome,” Shelley wrote, “at once the Paradise, / The grave, the city, and the wilderness.”

Neither Keats nor Shelley were really on a grand tour when they died—they fall into the adjacent category of roving artists and/or invalids. The consumptive Keats was in Italy seeking a climate conducive to his failing health, while Shelley, already well-travelled, died in that shipwreck. But other grand tourists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are interred there.

Georg Werpup, twenty-five-year-old son of a Hanoverian noble, was killed in a carriage accident after leaving Rome for Venice in 1765. James MacDonald, baronet of Sleat, also twenty-five, was a brilliant young Scot (a portrait of him and his brother as children hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery). He died in Rome in 1766 of some unspecified disease. The famous biographer James Boswell dubbed him “the Scottish Marcellus,” after Emperor Augustus’s nephew, another promising noble who died tragically young in Rome. MacDonald’s gravestone was designed by his friend, the artist Giambattista Piranesi. He is said to have been the first Protestant to be granted by the Pope the right to a public funeral in Rome.

When you stand in front of these gravestones you are recalling an era when the grand tour was considered a finishing school for every young upper-class European. Keats and Shelley lived and died in an era when leisure travel was the preserve of the wealthy and privileged.

The grand tour was no spring-break fling. Popularized in the seventeenth century, it was typically a long, circuitous European journey undertaken by young men of good birth in order to broaden their cultural, philosophical and moral horizons. An itinerary could last years and generally included Paris, Florence, Venice and Rome, as well as numerous other European stops (often including some difficult trekking over the Alps), and sometimes incorporating periods of study at institutions of higher learning.

It was not intended that young grandees would fall so in love with strange places that they would be tempted to stay and adopt their customs. Rather, the callow heir who left his homeland was expected to return from the grand tour a well-rounded—but still English, or German, or Scandinavian—young man.

In 1678 Jean Gailhard, an Englishman who had served as a chaperone and guide for various young swains, published The Compleat Gentleman, one volume of which was dedicated to instructing would-be grand tourists and offering cautionary advice. “Most mischiefs which in Italy befall Strangers are upon the account of Women,” Gailhard advises, “in France, about certain points of honor, and in Germany about drinking.”

Gailhard also worried about young travelers gaining the opportunity to read novels (or “romances”)—possibly corrupting, but worthwhile if read judiciously. But, he warned, steer clear of anything written by Jesuits. “Books of Jesuites do countenance any sinful practice, and corrupt wholly morality,” he writes.

Some of Gailhard’s themes will resonate with modern travelers, such as his rejection of fear: “For if dangers ought to be so much minded, no body must drink out of a Gold or Silver Cup, because some were poisoned out of the like; no body go to Sea, because some are drowned…so that take away dangers, there is no reward, no merits, nor virtue.”

He also advised the wisdom of learning local languages. “This can rid him of the surprizal others are subject to, who coming into a Foreign Country, and understanding not one word of the Tongue, look as if they were fallen from the Clouds.” (I hang my head in shameful recognition.)

Gailhard’s seventeenth-century travel guide may now be best known for its closing flourish—a series of capsule descriptions of different European peoples in various categories. “In Behaviour: French courteous; Spaniard lordly; Italian amorous; German clownish. In Conversation: The French jovial; Spaniard troublesome; Italian complying; German unpleasant. In Affection: The French loveth everywhere; The Spaniard very well; The Italian knows how to love; The German knows not how to love.”

That’s a rather nasty Yelp review for Germans. But in the developing genre of travel guide literature, they would eventually offer a powerful rebuttal.

Gailhard’s guide is aimed exclusively at young men—it was they who had the privilege of travel while their sisters properly remained at home. Over the years, however, some upper-class women did venture to make the tour, sometimes with husbands or family, but not always. One of the most notable was a woman who often visited the Protestant Cemetery to weep at the grave of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their child. That woman’s name was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

As both traveller and author, Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, followed in the footsteps of her famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792 Wollstonecraft had published the proto-feminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, leaving for France shortly afterward. No respectable travel guide would have recommended the trip. The Eiffel Tower would not be built until a century later, so Paris’s real must-see that year would have been the busy guillotine in Revolution Square. Louis XVI was beheaded in what is now Place de la Concorde about a month after Wollstonecraft’s arrival. She subsequently found herself witness, chronicler, near-victim and sometime defender of the French Revolution. Wollstonecraft died in 1797, eleven days after giving birth to the future author of Frankenstein.

In the dismal summer of 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (as she then was), her stepsister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s physician John William Polidori gathered at a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. This gloomy vacation is now enshrined as the romantic and literary high point of grand tourism (whether or not their Swiss vacation really qualifies as a true example of the phenomenon). Wet and miserable weather kept them indoors and, lacking Netflix, they entertained each other with readings from Fantasmagoriana, a collection of German ghost stories.

One night Byron suggested they entertain each other by coming up with their own ghost stories.

Byron and Shelley were clearly the leading literary lights of the group, and yet the most lasting entries in the resulting competition would come from Polidori and Godwin. Polidori would eventually write the short story “The Vampyre,” the first published example of that durable supernatural genre, with a central figure reportedly based on Byron. After a few days of creative torment Godwin would have a vision that led to the book on which her reputation is based, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

This fabled Lake Geneva gathering has been depicted many times in book, play and film, and it’s no wonder—aside from the seminal literary output, the romantic turbulence and relentless tragedy its members generated left them just a couple of dragons short of a Game of Thrones franchise. Centuries later it can be difficult to sort through all the collective angst.

Clairmont was pregnant with Byron’s child at the time of their Lake Geneva stay—at some later point she quite likely became Shelley’s lover as well. As for Shelley and Godwin, when they first eloped to Europe in 1814 Shelley was still married to his first wife Harriet Westbrook, who gave birth to his child shortly after the lovers skipped the country. Shelley and Godwin would later have four children of their own, only one of whom would live past the age of three. Byron and Clairmont’s child, Allegra, would die of typhus at age five, a tragedy for which Clairmont blamed Byron. After Shelley and Godwin returned to England from Switzerland they learned Godwin’s half-sister Fanny Imlay had committed suicide because, Godwin believed, she was in love with Shelley. No wonder Godwin wrote to a friend in 1819, “We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy.”

As for the men who told and listened to ghost stories beside Lake Geneva in that cold, rainy summer, all three were marked for early death. Polidori would die, an apparent suicide, in 1821, a year before Shelley’s fatal shipwreck. Byron’s death in Greece followed two years later. Fantasmagoriana, it would seem, was a cursed book.

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Excerpted from Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel by Steve Burgess. Copyright © 2024. Published by Douglas & McIntyre (2013) Ltd. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.