Rosemary Sweet is Professor of Urban History at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. Her previous publications include The English Town, Government, Society and Culture (1999) and Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004).

• Introduction; 1. Experiencing the Grand Tour; 2. Florence: a home from home; 3. Rome ancient and modern; 4. Naples: leisure, pleasure and a frisson of danger; 5. Venice: a place of singularity and spectacle; 6. Medievalism and the Grand Tour; Conclusion; Bibliography.

'No-one has mined the wealth of English travel writing in Italy from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century more assiduously or imaginatively than Rosemary Sweet. Her elegant, wide-ranging and compelling book develops a forceful critique of recent scholarship on the cultural and social histories of the Grand Tour, while at the same time skilfully demonstrating how the reactions of English men and women to the great cities of Italy reflected much wider changes in perceptions of national, social, gender and cultural identities, of the self and the modern. A must for specialists and sheer delight for everyone else.' John A. Davis, University of Connecticut