"Of all the great Italian painters, Caravaggio speaks most clearly and powerfully to our time. Caravaggio's early paintings of cardsharps, musicians, and street vendors convey his familiarity and fascination with the Roman underworld; his stark and brilliant religious paintings represent, for the first time in European art, the world of the poor, the suffering, and the outcast, and they depict the religious experience of the individual with a directness...

In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travellers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point...