À La Ronde, or the new Grand Tour

THE GRAND TOUR is the name given to a tour of Europe originally undertaken by wealthy British young men from around 1660. It served as an educational rite of passage, as it exposed these men to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the fashionable society of Continental Europe. Around the eighteenth century, the fashion of the Grand Tour spread around Europe and the Americas. There are several literary accounts of this hip trip from this period, like for instance the one written by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Journey to Italy (1817). What transpires from Goethe’s text is how formative the experience of the Grand Tour was for his artistic and personal development. Goethe’s diaries ac-count for his journey as an enlightened adventure combin-ing free wandering, observation and philosophical reflec-tion with some exciting yet challenging social and intimate encounters. It was a unique opportunity for the sheltered young fellow to bridge into a more mature phase of his life and career. The Grand Tour didn’t become a feminine affair until the late 1770s, and it was for a long time an endeavour mostly undertaken by divorcées or by those who needed to escape their social milieu for not complying to its strict moral rules. Remarkably, a group of women who under-took the trip in the 1780s left as a legacy an eccentric architectural work, À La Ronde (1795) – a sixteen-sided house built in East Devon to display the travel mementos of their pioneering ten-year-long Grand Tour. The extraor-dinary interior decoration of À La Ronde includes a feather frieze, gathered from native game birds and chickens; and a delicate shell-encrusted gallery, said to contain nearly 25,000 shells collected from different parts of Europe. THE TRADITION OF THE GRAND TOUR continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, al-though in its more modern version the trip usually extended beyond the con-fines of the European continent, and in search for more idiosyncratic cultural exchanges and adventures. A remark-able character who immortalised this renewed practice of travelling wa