El Grand Tour de Josep Anton de Cabanyes i Ballester (1797-1852). Viatges i afició col·leccionista a la llum d’Europa

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The Grand Tour was a phenomenon carried out by young people from the aristocratic and bourgeois elites of Northern Europe who, from the end of the 17th century and well into the 19th century, undertook a journey that took them to Florence and Rome —the cities that had been the cradle of the classical culture—and, progressively, to Naples or Sicily, where the powerful and picturesque charm of the eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna or the discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the Greek vestiges awaited them. When he was just a young man of nineteen who was training in Amsterdam in the tradition of commerce, Josep Anton de Cabanyes Ballester (1797-1852) decided to undertake the journey under the gaze of Ulysses. This extraordinary vital and formative journey led him to travel through Spain, England, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy between 1816 and 1824, an itinerary that was recorded in a small travel book written in German and until now unpublished. The transcription and translation of the manuscript, the study of Josep Anton’s huge library and the analysis of his hobby as a collector — a good part of the works have fortunately been preserved in the Masía de Cabanyes de Vilanova i la Geltrú — make it possible to vindicate him as a man of liberal ideas with a Frenchified spirit that was dazzled by the vision of post-Napoleonic Europe, where the flame of the Enlightenment and high culture was kept alive. On the other hand, the lacking tradition in the vernacular literature of stories about the Grand Tour makes his experience even more unique and valuable.