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If there is little reference to the classical and Renaissance artistic heritage that guided tourists’ Italian itineraries and that so often anchors Grand Tour scholarship, readers will be fascinated to discover an alternative human topography. As several authors note, the new opportunities and attendant tensions characteristic of the period must be understood against the backdrop of the increasingly secular nature of public life and expanding access to the intellectual fruits of Enlightenment culture. Settecento Italy emerges here as a vibrant period marked by contests over gender roles, with particular emphasis on women’s access to knowledge and their exercise of intellectual and cultural power. Among other topics, essays explore women’s changing relationships to public sites of intellectual and cultural life and examine the challenges posed by women and men whose behaviors or bodies put them at odds with societal norms. The collection scrutinizes selected institutions and individuals with an eye to broader discursive and representational practices. The volume’s emphasis on the view from within rewards readers with new perspectives on Italy’s eighteenth century and, given Italy’s role as cosmopolitan center, Europe’s eighteenth century more generally. This volume proposes to expand our understanding of the place and period by examining the particular cultural episodes of the Italian peninsula “in its own terms” (7). This approach, shared by many of the foremost Grand Tour scholars, has yielded fundamental insights about foreign perceptions of Italy, albeit one that Findlen observes can threaten to reduce the site to “an itinerary rather than a living, breathing entity” (4). The volume’s ambitious core contribution is couched methodologically: to unsettle the tendency to examine Italy of the Grand Tour primarily through the eyes of foreign visitors whereby “Italy” emerges as a sort of afterimage, a composite of lived experiences, mythic tropes, and memories. The collection makes available in English the recent work of established Italian scholars who are united with their North American counterparts by their scrupulous mining of archival sources the generous footnotes shed light on a veritable treasure trove of primary documents. Like Paula Findlen’s excellent introduction, the collection reflects a “multidisciplinary conversation about the state of this field” (1), with authors hailing from the history of science, history of art, history of music, literature, and gender studies. Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour is an important addition to this literature, charting new territory by examining Italy in the age of Enlightenment with a view from inside. The Grand Tour was founded on the experience of boundary crossing, and the best recent work on the subject has explored how the touristic encounter with real and imagined Italian geographies put productive pressure on national, class, and gender identities. The subject’s enduring interest is surely also due to the fact that it has proven especially fertile ground for art history’s disciplinary move toward thinking beyond national borders. The significance of ancient and Renaissance art to the Grand Tour itinerary-together with the emergence of modern display practices and attendant opportunities for the exercise of aesthetic judgment-have conspired to guarantee the Grand Tour’s special appeal to art historians. Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practiceįollowing an efflorescence of critical work on the subject over the last twenty-five years, the European Grand Tour has emerged as a focus of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship.Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.