This paper explores the way in which nineteenth-century travellers to Salonica conveyed in writing the experience of travel to, and in, this Ottoman city. Their descriptions of the city indicate the power of certain aesthetic tropes in shaping their impressions. The claims of the picturesque were pre-eminent for decades but they coexisted with other rationales for travel – in particular the value of the direct impression conveyed by a landscape impregnated with classical and Biblical associations. Nor were most travellers insensible to the changing political prospects for the Macedonian port. The historical value of such works lies less in their reliability as testimony to the changes in the city itself than in the way they express patterns of authorial cultural taste.