Cirrus@Austlit

'From the time of the early Enlightenment, the British upper classes sent their sons on the Grand Tour, a sort of moving finishing school through the great centres of classical and Renaissance Europe. As Edward Gibbon wrote in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.” Young men from other northern principalities also hit the trail, which led south, often through France, to the rolling landscapes and art treasures of Italy: the epitome of civilisation.' (Introduction)