British Architects on the Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy: Travels, People, Places

British Architects on the Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Travel and biographical data concerning sixty-nine British architects who visited Italy in the eighteenth century
Sources: J. Ingamells (compiled), Dictionary of British and Irish Travelers to Italy, 1701-1800, Yale University Press 1997, and H. Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840, Yale University press, 1995 (3rd edition)
Date: October 25, 2015

The Travels table contains the records for the travels to Italy of the architects in our data set. This travel data is organized by trips, which we define as visits to individual locations. When information is available, trips have Start date (that is arrival date to a location) and End date (that is departure date from a location); for trips with this information we attribute duration. Architects’ tours are constituted by the trips, set in chronological sequence, occurring during the same journey to Italy (some architects traveled to Italy more than once, thus have more than one tour).

The People table contains the records of biographical information we have collected for the architects in our data set. We have recorded, when available, information concerning each individual’s service in public office and political appointments, how they funded their tours of Italy, what was their education, and what their affiliations with societies and academies. We have also recorded when our sources label an architect as an amateur architect.

The Places table contains geographical, historical and political information for the places in the travel records of the architects in our data set. We have attributed coordinates and grouped locations in terms of political territory to map locations geographically and order them by state and groups in the timeline.