Book presentation

FIGURE ILLUSTRI

Protagonisti del Grand Tour a Roma e in Vaticano

Illustrious Figures

Protagonists of the Grand Tour in Rome and in the Vatican

Tuesday 5 May 2026 - 17.30

Vatican Museums Conference Hall

PRESS RELEASE

Vatican City: On Tuesday 5 May, at 17.30, Pier Andrea De Rosa’s book Figure illustri. Protagonisti del Grand Tour a Roma e in Vaticano (“Illustrious Figures: Protagonists of the Grand Tour in Rome and the Vatican”) will be presented in the Conference Hall of the Vatican Museums. Recently published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani, the book recounts the Grand Tour as seen through the eyes of distinguished travellers. Through the accounts of twelve “illustrious figures”, the reader takes part in the epic journey of discovery, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of the Eternal City and the Vatican.

Travel diaries and letters are the sources from which Pier Andrea De Rosa draws to paint a vivid and impassioned picture that invites us “to accompany some of these ‘strangers’ and listen to their impressions”. Narrating not only the beauty of the ruins of ancient Rome and the splendour of Raphael’s Rooms, but also the logistical hardships experienced by the travellers, are the voices of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Madame de Staël, George Gordon Byron, Charlotte Anne Waldie Eaton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen, William Mitchell Gillespie, Charles Dickens, George Stillman Hillard, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Barbara Jatta, Director of the Vatican Museums comments: “Pier Andrea De Rosa has sought in this fine volume to present a selection of figures who were able to capture the sublime beauty of Rome and the Vatican. He has done so with the skill and sensitivity characteristic of a scholar and connoisseur of Rome and its surrounding countryside. De Rosa has woven a narrative spanning almost two centuries: the golden ages of the Grand Tour, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A journey that was a joy and a solace for the spirit, yet also a demanding task, at least for those who, like Goethe, resolved to ‘look’ rather than merely ‘see’”.

For Byron, Rome is the “City of the soul”, while Madame de Staël asked her friend Claude Hochet, “Would you ever have thought it possible that you could love a city other than Paris?”: Goethe’s journey to Rome, writes Pier Andrea De Rosa, is “a sovereign longing of the soul, the inescapable call of a land so often yearned for”, when the German poet, standing before Michelangelo, “seems to have barely the strength to whisper: “The Last Judgement and Michelangelo’s various paintings on the ceiling have vied for our admiration. I could only gaze and marvel”’.

The volume opens with a rich introduction by the author, a veritable guide to the journey towards the coveted destination of Rome, whilst the illustrations range from engravings and Roman views of the period to the immortal works of the Vatican Museums. Illustrious Figures. Protagonists of the Grand Tour in Rome and the Vatican is a valuable tool for reconstructing the atmosphere of an era in which “the awareness of Rome’s millennial role as the heir to Western civilisation, alongside that of seat, shield, bulwark and standard-bearer of Christianity, the creation in 1734 of the Capitoline Museum and of the Pio Clementino Museum in 1771 – to be regarded as the facets of the most precious diamond of any civilised society – and the echo of the daily, epoch-making archaeological discoveries in the ancient depths of the City, stood as a powerful and inescapable call”.

Introduced by Barbara Jatta, the conference will feature Pier Andrea De Rosa, Mario Bevilacqua – Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, a scholar of architecture and author of numerous publications on Piranesi and the Grand Tour era – and Pietro Zander, Head of Artistic Heritage at the Fabric of Saint Peter in the Vatican, who in his studies has repeatedly highlighted the magnificence of the Basilica, described by Byron as “Christ’s mighty shrine above his martyr’s tomb”.

The conference will be livestreamed at: https://www.youtube.com/@MuseiVaticaniMv/streams

Journalists and media operators who wish to participate must apply via the Holy See Press Office online accreditation system, at: press.vatican.va/accreditamenti

All requests must be received no later than 24 hours before the event.

Contacts

Press Office: stampa.musei@scv.va