'English Italianate is Devil Incarnate': National Prejudices and the Role of Grandtourists in the Hybridisation of European Cultural Memory

The Grand Tour can be described as a powerful process of hybridisation that contributed to the formation of a new European consciousness, based on a fund of shared cultural memories. Far from being a peaceful evolution, however, this process should rather be regarded as the result of a series of conflicts. The Medieval pilgrimage had thrived in an epoch of 'universalism', under the aegis of a still undivided Christian Church. The Grand Tour, on the other hand, was the product of the Renaissance and its aftermath, a period when the main European countries increasingly asserted their national identities, while political and cultural landscapes were further differentiated by the rift between Catholics and Protestants brought about by the Reformation. The Grand Tour had a complex relationship with these sweeping changes and clashes. On the one hand, the travellers' experience of other countries reinforced their national and religious identities, encouraging the formation of stereotypes, while on the other it called those identities into question.