Few controversies can have struck more resonant chords than the feud begun in 1766 by Samuel Sharp with his jaundiced travel-book, Letters from Italy. In 1805 Coleridge noted that travellers came in two kinds, ‘both bad’, but found in favour of the Sharpians. In 1807 Jane Austen reminded Cassandra of an old quarrel on this score, admitting to some change in her view:

That it was nine years back that ‘Susan’ took shape may have helped her date the argument with her sister, for Baretti's Journey from London to Genoa (1770), the better tempered of his replies to Sharp, intersects with the novel finally published as Northanger Abbey.

Baretti addresses the account of his native Italy to the English, and sums up his theme in the slogan, ‘it is in your country as in all others’. His aim is to oust the fashion for disparaging travels set by Sharp and Smollett, recently lampooned by Sterne in the figure of Smelfungus. With Shandean guile, he preludes his continental trip with a tale of ‘petty tyranny’ that exposes a horrendous underside to ‘the rural beauties of Devonshire’. A land-agent maliciously ruins the business of an innkeeper after being rejected by his daughter, and his case cuts clean to the nub of contention: