Going Slowly

I have been thinking a great deal lately about how badly we travel.

Not all of us, and not all the time. But there is a particular shape travel has taken in our century - the long weekend, the optimised itinerary, the queue for the same view that several thousand other people have queued for, the photograph taken before quite looking up. We have not lost our appetite for going somewhere. We have lost, I think, our sense of what going somewhere is for.

And so, lately, I find myself returning to two older ideas - one architectural, one educational - that, taken together, suggest what travelling well used to mean, and might still.

A Stonemason in Rome

Andrea di Pietro della Gondola was born in Padua in 1508 and apprenticed, at thirteen, to a stonemason. There was nothing in his early life that promised what came next. He was, by every measure of the time, a tradesman.

What changed his life was a journey.

In his early thirties, in the company of a humanist patron - Gian Giorgio Trissino, who would also give him the name by which we know him, Palladio - he went to Rome. And there, with a measuring tape and a sketchbook, he did something almost no architect of his generation had thought to do. He went to the ruins themselves. He climbed the Pantheon. He drew the Colosseum. He measured the proportions of buildings that had been standing for fourteen hundred years and asked, simply, what they knew that he did not.

He went more than once. He stayed long. He read, alongside his measuring, the surviving writings of Vitruvius - the Roman architect who, in the first century BCE, had set down the principles by which his buildings had been made. And then he went home to the Veneto and, slowly, over the rest of his life, he rebuilt the world.

The villas he designed - La Rotonda outside Vicenza, the Villa Barbaro at Maser, the Villa Foscari on the Brenta - were not copies of what he had seen in Rome. They were translations: the proportions of an ancient temple applied to a country house, the discipline of antiquity offered to the everyday life of a Venetian patrician. In 1570 he published the Quattro Libri dell’Architettura: four small books that contained the diagrams, the rules, the buildings.

Then Palladio’s book got onto a ship.

The Book That Travelled

The English architect Inigo Jones came across the Quattro Libri in the early seventeenth century, travelled to Italy with it under his arm, and brought it home. A hundred years later Lord Burlington built Chiswick House in West London as a small Palladian villa transplanted to the Thames. By the eighteenth century Palladio had become, effectively, the operating system of British architecture. Country houses. Town squares. Banks and libraries. Anywhere a column was placed in England between 1715 and 1820, Palladio was somewhere behind it.

Then the book got onto another ship. Thomas Jefferson, at Monticello, called Palladio his bible. The White House is Palladian. The Capitol is Palladian. So, for that matter, are a thousand colonial homesteads in Australia, with their symmetrical verandas and their disciplined, slightly displaced proportions.

A stonemason from Padua went to Rome with a measuring tape and changed the shape of every public and private building in the English-speaking world for three hundred years.

That is what travelling well, once, was capable of doing.

The Grand Tour

It is no coincidence that, in roughly the same century Palladio’s influence became universal, the English upper classes invented the practice we know as the Grand Tour. The phrase was coined by Richard Lassels, an English Catholic priest who, in 1670, argued in his Voyage of Italy that no young gentleman could be considered properly educated until he had spent two or three years on the road in Europe.

The route was standard. Across the Channel at Dover. Paris, for manners and language. Lyon, Geneva, the Alps at Mont Cenis - a real journey, sometimes by sedan chair carried by porters across the snow. Then Turin, Florence, Rome for the winter, Naples, and Venice for Carnival. Home by way of Vienna, with trunks of paintings and sculptures and Palladian sketches and a head full of things that were not in the head before.

What was it for? Not, despite what we might assume, leisure. The Grand Tour was the final stage of an education - the part that could not happen in a library. You went to Italy because the Renaissance had happened there and the classical world before it; because if you were going to design a house in Bedfordshire, or sit in Parliament debating what kind of country you wanted England to be, you had better have stood in Vicenza and looked at Palladio’s proportions yourself.

You went, in other words, to let your eye be made by the world.

The greatest record of all this is Goethe’s Italian Journey. He left Karlsbad on the third of September, 1786, almost in secret, and did not properly return for nearly two years. He was thirty-seven, already famous, already exhausted by his own celebrity, and he went not to amuse himself but to be remade. What he found there is the part I keep returning to. Not the monuments - though he loved them - but the way that, slowly, sitting in courtyards in Rome and watching fishermen in Naples, his sense of what a human life could properly contain simply enlarged.

He was not doing anything in particular for months at a time. He was being changed.

What Got Lost

The Grand Tour eventually democratised itself, which was a good thing, and was killed in the process, which was perhaps inevitable. Karl Baedeker began publishing his guidebooks in 1827. John Murray’s followed in 1836. Thomas Cook ran his first excursion train in 1841 and his first European package tour in 1855. What had been a long, expensive, transformational education for a few became, gradually, a holiday for the many - and then, in our century, a flight, a hotel, an attraction, a coffee, a flight home.

I am not against any of this. The democratisation of travel is one of the real goods of the modern age. The error is not that more of us travel. The error is that we have inherited the form of the journey without the purpose. We still go to Florence. We just no longer go to be changed by it.

How We Might Travel Better

I have been turning this over for a while. There are, I think, a few small things one can do.

Read first, and read seriously. A place is more than the sum of its photographs, and the eye needs context to see anything at all. Goethe spent years reading Winckelmann before he ever set foot in Rome; Palladio spent years reading Vitruvius before he ever climbed the Pantheon. The looking is prepared by the reading.

Then stay longer. The Grand Tour ran in months, not weekends. A place gives up its character slowly, and only to those who have time. Three days tells you almost nothing; three weeks begins to. And once is rarely enough - the second visit is when a city starts to be yours.

Sit with people. The most valuable hours of any trip I have ever taken have been the ones spent in conversation - with a glassblower in Murano, with a paper-marbler in Florence, over a long lunch in Sicily with four members of one ceramics family: two brothers who, as boys, first learned the craft helping their mother, now sitting at the table beside the people they have brought into it.

And bring something home. The word souvenir comes from the French se souvenir - to remember. The Grand Tourist returned with paintings, sculptures, and Palladian sketches - not as decoration, but as the physical record of years that had altered him. The object was the trip, made portable, made permanent.

What an Object Holds

This is, I have come to think, the connection that links all of this to what I do.

When I press an unmarked doorbell in Florence and sit for an hour with a maker whose family has been in that room since 1856, I am - in a quiet, modern, considerably less aristocratic way - taking part in the same practice. I am letting my eye be made. I am being changed by what I find. And when I bring something back, it is not because I think any one object is essential, but because the object holds the afternoon. The conversation. The fact that this particular family chose to keep doing this thing for a hundred and seventy years.

That is what an object can do, when it has been made by a person whose hands remember what they have made. It carries the trip - not yours, theirs - into your room.

This is, I suppose, what The Leopard is for. To bring back the kind of object that holds a place and a person and an afternoon.

A stonemason from Padua once went to Rome with a measuring tape and changed the world. The world is still worth the long way through it. The eye still needs to be made. And the things we bring home with us - if we are paying attention - remain the record of who we became while we were away.

Every object at The Leopard is hand-made, and sourced directly from the maker. Each one is, in its small way, a Grand Tour brought home.