"Ma’s a card!” said Brent with loving approval. “You can always count on her to do the right thing and not embarrass you in front of folks.”
“Yes, but she’s mighty liable to talk embarrassing in front of Father and the girls when we get home tonight,” said Stuart gloomily. “Look, Brent. I guess this means we don’t go to Europe. You know Mother said if we got expelled from another college we couldn’t have our Grand Tour.” “Well, hell! We don’t care, do we? What is there to see in Europe?"
--Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind, 1936, p. 16. MacMillan Publishers
We invite you to explore an exceptional, little-known world of design and art-of-living in the most beautiful country in the world. Unlike other interior design and travel magazines, Grand Tour focuses on "secret Italy"--that is, the inner Italy of a level of art and architecture known only to the top curators and historians from the country and to those who are descendants from the families that gave this country its remarkable grandeur. In this respect Grand Tour is as daring as it is distinguished: it stands alone, setting an aesthetic standard that offers not only sumptuous interiors and unusual locations, but also the rare insight of literature and scholarship, educated opinion and recommendations. Grand Tour is more than an escape, it is a destiny.
Grand Tour, which runs about seventy-five joyous, image-rich pages, celebrates the timeless tradition of Italy as the "finishing school" of a proper education in the arts and the art of life, one that was initiated in England and Germany in the 18th century and continued well through the first half of the 20th century, with particularly avid participation of the American upper class. Edith Wharton, Henry James, William Vanderbilt, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Harvard president Charles Francis Adams and his cousin writer Henry Adams; John Ruskin, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mark Twain, Cecilia Beaux and countless others. Their legacy lives on not only in their unforgettable writings, their epic poetry or in their famous paintings but within the secluded, sumptuous inner-world of the phenomenal villas, castles and celebrated gardens that they left behind in Italy as legacy of and testimony to their profound love and appreciation for that country
Published once a year as a special supplement to a subscription to Old Masters International, our beautiful Grand Tour will be expanding into its own separate publication, as previewed for next year, owing to the immense interest expressed in our work.
Published once a year as a special supplement to a subscription to Old Masters International, our beautiful Grand Tour will be expanding into its own separate publication, as previewed for next year, owing to the immense interest expressed in our work.