Luciana Jacobelli’s Donne e Grand Tour. Viaggiatrici a Napoli, Pompei, Ercolano e Vesuvio tra ’700 e ’800 contributes to the growing body of scholarship on women’s mobility in the modern era. It aims to shed light on the experiences of women – mostly from the upper classes – who made the Grand Tour in Italy between 1740 and 1860, focusing on the Campania region. Traditionally a male prerogative, the Grand Tour offered many women an opportunity for cultural enrichment and intellectual affirmation.
Organised chronologically and concluding with a chapter dedicated to Italian women travellers, the book explores the motivations, challenges and distinctive features of these journeys. It offers a nuanced portrait of Naples and its surroundings – a fascinating yet contradictory setting where the splendour of ruins coexisted with stark social inequalities. An old saying went that Naples was ‘a paradise inhabited by devils’ (p. 56), a phrase that aptly captures the ambivalent perceptions of many travellers.
Jacobelli examines the experiences of figures such as Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the first women to travel to Campania in the eighteenth century. Her letters reveal a keen and ironic gaze on Neapolitan society, which she approached with openness and critical insight. She was particularly – and unexpectedly – struck by what she described as the ‘traces of Spanish honour’ (p. 67).
By the nineteenth century, women’s travel experiences reached new dimensions: Madame de Staël grasped the cultural and political contrasts of the region; Mary Shelley discovered in it ‘the secret of Italian poetry’ (p. 129), while criticising the arrogance of her fellow countrymen; and Marguerite Power Blessington became actively involved in local cultural life, praising the industriousness of the Neapolitan people (‘The Neapolitans, like their volcanic land, are never at rest’, p. 134). Others, such as Louise Colet, were committed to protecting the archaeological heritage and actively supported the Risorgimento, combining culture, politics and direct involvement in contemporary historical events in their writings.
One of the book’s most valuable features is its focus on Italian women travellers, who have often been neglected by historiography. Jacobelli thus explores the journeys of Margherita Boccapaduli and Cecilia Stazzone De Gregorio, who represent different approaches to female travel. Boccapaduli, a Roman noblewoman, travelled through southern Italy in the late eighteenth century with a distinctly emancipated outlook and a keen scientific curiosity. She wrote with wonder about the ruins of Pompeii: ‘It was a great pleasure for me to go to the source of so many rarities … This is the famous City of Pompeii, which for many centuries lay buried by one of those eruptions that transform cities into tombs in a few hours’ (pp. 166–167). By contrast, Stazzone De Gregorio, who was of Sicilian origin and therefore made a ‘reverse’ journey from the South to the North, concentrated on the everyday aspects of the places she visited. Her reflections on local conditions remain of interest today for their insights into the customs, traditions, and socio-economic landscape of pre-Unification Italy.
Although Jacobelli does not address it explicitly, the book contributes to the wider critical debate on travel writing as a historical source. As scholars such as Augusto Placanica have observed, travel accounts have long been a primary means of knowledge about southern Italy, filling in the gaps left by more conventional archival sources. However, travel writing also poses significant challenges for historians, as travellers were never neutral observers. They interpreted reality through their expectations, biases and cultural frameworks, often finding in the South exactly what they expected to see, thereby perpetuating myths and stereotypes.
Jacobelli argues that while women travellers shared some of these tendencies, they also introduced more nuanced perspectives, demonstrating a heightened sensitivity to everyday details, social dynamics, and the human fabric of the places they encountered – elements often overlooked by their male counterparts. Anna Riggs Miller, for example, accurately described a kitchen reconstructed in the Portici Museum, complete with utensils that were unfamiliar in British households. Her experiential and perceptive gaze turned the kitchen into a space of cultural exploration and personal interpretation, offering a transcultural and diachronic point of view. Mary Berry, on the other hand, was intrigued by the workings of local courts and the tradition of the nativity scene, which many foreign visitors either ignored or dismissed from an ethnocentric point of view. Mariana Starke took a pragmatic approach, noting the appropriate amounts for tips and recommending places to buy good silk stockings. Likewise, Mary Louisa Boyle offered vivid portrayals of daily life, demonstrating a desire to establish a deeper contact with Naples and its inhabitants – a relationship based, at least in part, on dialogue. These women thus demonstrated a gendered specificity in how they read and represented their surroundings.
Jacobelli provides a picturesque and well-documented study based on a rich selection of primary sources (diaries, letters and memoirs), many of which are unpublished or little studied. The book highlights the emancipatory dimensions of female travel and offers an original take on women’s perceptions of Italy. While its approach is at times more descriptive than analytical, and the book engages only modestly with gender studies scholarship, Donne e Grand Tour makes a significant contribution to the history of women’s mobility. It also pays careful attention to the visual representation of the Grand Tour through portraits, engravings and illustrations of the period. An archaeologist and expert on the Grand Tour, Jacobelli brings to light an often-overlooked aspect of this phenomenon, opening up new avenues of research into European cultural memory and the depiction of southern Italy in women’s travel narratives.
Despite being rooted in the past, the Grand Tour still resonates in the contemporary imagination, where the gaze on the ‘Other’ continues to oscillate between wonder, rejection, stereotype, nostalgia and a perspective still affected by colonial legacies. Addressing a female readership, the women travellers of the time in many ways anticipated the symbolic function of today’s influencers; they mediated a dream, shaping an image of Italy that still exists to some extent.
