Step back in time: Rare Grand Tour books bring the ‘Eternal City’ to life at Welsh university open day

Adam Johannes

Rome’s timeless beauty will be brought a little closer to home this month as a Welsh university opens its doors to reveal a treasure trove of rare books celebrating the “Eternal City”.

The University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) is hosting a special open day showcasing historic volumes from its Special Collections, some dating back more than 300 years.

The event takes place on Wednesday 18 February at the Roderic Bowen Library and Archives on the university’s Lampeter campus, with sessions at 10am and 2pm. Visitors will be treated to a short introductory talk before being given the rare chance to examine the beautifully illustrated books up close.

Spanning the 17th to 19th centuries, the collection offers a vivid glimpse of Rome as generations of artists, architects, and aristocrats once saw it, a city layered with visible history and artistic wonder.

Highlights include Giambattista Piranesi’s breathtaking Le antichità romane, alongside guidebooks made for wealthy young travellers embarking on the famous Grand Tour.

Piranesi, the supreme printmaker of the eighteenth century, was an Italian archaeologist, architect, and artist, best known for his etchings of Rome and his imagined, atmospheric “prisons.”

He once remarked, with characteristic bravado, “I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”

Tour

The Grand Tour was a tour of European cultural centres, once serving as a finishing school for the elite, with Italy as its magnetic centre. From the late 17th century to the early 19th century, the journey was undertaken by young men of wealth and breeding once they reached maturity.

Usually shepherded by a tutor or dutiful relative, the tour was meant to educate them about art, history, and culture by seeing famous places for themselves. Popular from around 1660 until trains made travel faster in the 1840s, the Grand Tour was seen as an important rite of passage into adulthood.

Also on display is Views in Rome and its Environs by Edward Lear. Though better known for his nonsense poetry, Lear was a professional landscape painter and skilled lithographer.

Created during his first extended journey through Italy, a country that became his second home, the prints retain the freshness of an artist’s first encounter with Rome, “drawn from nature and on the stone” by Lear himself.

Many of the books would have been bought as keepsakes by young aristocrats touring Europe, while others were created by architects keen to promote their work back home.

Ruth Gooding, Special Collections Librarian at UWTSD, said the books remain as evocative today as they were centuries ago.

“We have a wonderful selection of books about Rome. As well as being truly beautiful, they help bring the experiences of 18th-century Grand Tourists to life, while also whetting the appetite of 21st-century travellers dreaming of visiting the eternal city.”

To find out more or to book a place, contact Ruth Gooding at [email protected]