ARTISTS AND ARCHITECTS HAD FOLLOWED THEIR INSPIRATIONAL COMPASSES to Rome for centuries, but in the sixteenth century they began arriving in droves from all over Italy and Europe. With sketchbooks in hand, they came to study – and draw, paint, or etch seemingly every antiquity, palace, piazza, and bend in the Tiber River. The city was their subject – its buildings, ruins, topography, and people (Fig. 198).

After the Thirty Years War ended in 1648, when European travel became easier and safer, Italy enjoyed a more or less permanent surge of cultural tourism. For gentlemen of rank, particularly those from Great Britain, an extended period of European travel known as the Grand Tour, taking many months and sometimes years, was expected. The tour rapidly became a social and educational phenomenon – a kind of peripatetic finishing school in the gentleman's cultural education, culminating in Rome. King Louis XIV established the French Academy in 1666 so that artists and architects could measure and draw classical Rome as a foundation for their own contemporary practices. (Other nations followed only in the nineteenth century.) Although no longer a political force in Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, the city, with its fantastic mix of ancient relics and Renaissance buildings, still held allure and provided the excuse for educative travel – a new kind of pilgrimage, intellectual and aesthetic rather than religious, that Europe's burgeoning Protestant elites could embrace, and that could profit Romans catering to them.

Now the need to feed, quarter, and entertain distinguished visitors in suitable style, and to accommodate the vast retinues of servants and horses they had with them, acquired even greater urgency. The area at the foot of the Spanish Steps quickly became identified with the foreigners who tended to settle or sojourn there, particularly the British. Also, the need arose to respond to the visitors’ growing appetite to collect mementos, whether ancient sculpture or contemporary painted and printed views of the city and the Campagna (Fig. 199). Their lust for loot found a ready market, and the cultural tourists returned home with crate loads of antiquities and images of Rome's ancient and modern attractions.