Vacations in Hotels of Rome: The Guide

Rome has always been the goal of vacations that lasted a long or brief period. From year 1800 on the flow of tourists in hotels grew with regular intensity. Especially for Englishmen finding rooms in hotels to be able to spend a short terms of vacations in Rome, becomes an essential phase in the grand tour, already considered for some time the essential means for each gentleman´s education.

In the country houses of English country aristocracy, portraits with views of Rome and landscapes of the countryside of Vanvitelli or of van Bloemen, of other many landscapes are found.

Prints that represent the squares, the bridges over the Tiber, the basilicas, the ruins, the Coliseum, the Tivoli or Grottaferrata circulate in the city. The portrait or watercolor becomes the memory of the brief vacational period in the hotels in Rome. A theoretical and visionknowledge of the city is born even for those who had never visited it, and this illustrative material produced a more vivid desire to undertake the trip to Rome.

English travelers who dominate the scene early in the century find in Rome the satisfaction of diverse aesthetic ideals, since the pleasure for landscaping, the admiration for the grand style, the sympathy for the classic gist, until the sensation of picturesque and sublime mainly revealed by the voyage through the Alps and Miguel Angel's paintings.

For this diffusion of images all foreigners came to spend their vacations in the hotels of Rome, ready to admire before having seen anything.

Establishing their headquarters in the hotels, they all found in Rome the mirror of their own sensibility, frequently reacting raved and subjectivly. Introduced by guides lik l'Italian Voyage of Richard Lassel (1670-1698) and by the volume of Richardson which was fundamental, reflecting the influence of the Italian classicism and the pleasure for the rubénistes for the Veneti and Rubens, Englishmen didn't polarize their interest solely on the classic myth, they were sensitive followers of the values of the diverse tendencies and schools and became the bittercollectors looking for images and prints.

Thanks to this tourism was developed the travel literature - letters, newspapers, memos on vacations in the hotels of Rome, description of places - which was an entire English phenomenon rather than German.

A typical representative was Joseph Addison author of the Observations on some parts of Italy (1705) that reveal the traveler's interest for towns, customs, cars, hotels, behaviors, fashion, psychology, etc.. He speaks about the character of men, women, according to the life, the comfort or annoyance of hotels, the state of streets, and so forth. Of Rome he was attracted to monuments, the masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, painting, but mainly the ruins of the pagan city. He regrets the «ruin of the ruins» which fall to pieces day after day without maintenance, and he regrets the state in which monuments universally admired are.

Rome does not only fascinated Englishmen, also Americans who saw Rome like the most genuine symbol in the old Europe. So, after booking a room in the hotels of Rome, all felt like home, they found a new sense of humanity and a new creative impulse and mainly the conscience of history.

Writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote his famous novel, The Marble Faun, inspired by the old sculpture of a Faun at the Museum Of the Capitol, as he himself narrates in the introduction of the book. Other American writers who lived in the hotels in Rome, between 1850 and 1870 were, Herman Melville, Henry James and the incomparable Mark Twain who in 1867 came without abandoning his virtue of humorist and his habit of joking (The Innocents abroad... New York 1911).

The number of Americans who spent their vacations in Roman hotels and the impressions they kept, were so good that Henry Leland already in 1863 wrote Americans in Rome, the first book on the subject.

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