from 1709 onward. The unearthed Roman cities of herculaneum and pompeii, discovered in 1748, became essential stopping points for aristocrats (especially British) wishing to round out their education. The golden age of the “grand tour” is often reckoned to be between 1713 and 1793, bounded by political developments that encouraged and then restricted travel. Early tourists included Thomas Coke, later the first earl of Leicester (from 1712), and Lord Burlington (from 1715), and the Society of Dilettanti was formed in London in 1733 for tour veterans. The Greek Revival style in buildings and gardens took hold in this period, and many large collections of antiquities were formed.

It would be some time before archaeologists and travelers ventured farther south into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by the Bourbon kings of Naples, but to the north archaeological inquiry was expanding. Work continued in and around Rome, especially on the Palatine (from the 1720s), in the burial monuments along the Via Appia, and in the villas at Tivoli. Farther north fascination with the Etruscans increased dramatically from the start of the eighteenth century. Interest in this culture, especially in Tuscany but more widely in Italy and Europe as well, was so fervent that a term has been used ever since to describe the passion: Etruscheria. The Accademia Etrusca was founded in Cortona in 1727, and many important excavations followed. The Lucretian motto of the academy—obscura de re lucida pango (I Reveal Clear Things about an Obscure Matter)—took some time to be fully realized. Tuscan patriotism and the politico-cultural ambitions of the grand dukes of Tuscany saw just about every advance in ancient arts and sciences attributed to the Etruscans, who were promoted as the “first” Italians. Such misapprehensions explain why Josiah Wedgwood’s Staffordshire pottery, first produced in 1769, was named Etruria: his early models, painted vases from Etruscan tombs, were at the time thought to have been made in Etruria (whereas most had actually been imported from Athens). An important early Etruscologist was Antonio Gori, whose publications on Etruscan antiquities appeared between 1727 and 1762; he founded the Accademia Columbaria in 1735 in Florence, which rivaled Cortona’s Accademia Etrusca. Many of the worst excesses of the early Etruscologists were corrected later in the century—especially by Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810), who demonstrated (in 1789) that the Etruscan language was not derived from Hebrew and that most of the vases found in Etruscan tombs were in fact Greek.

Back in Rome the young Giovanni Piranesi arrived in the same year as the reigns of a series of enlightened popes began. Benedict XIV (r. 1740–1758) founded the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia (Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology), and Piranesi quickly graduated from being an engraver of archaeological vistas for grand tourists to being a full-scale topographer and archaeological draftsman. His forty-volume Le Antichità romane (Roman Antiquities; 1756) gained him great renown and was followed by many publications on Roman, Etruscan, and south Italian buildings and antiquities.

Perhaps the most notable arrival in the city of Rome was that of the German antiquarian johann joachim winckelmann (1717–1768). Made papal commissioner of antiquities, he produced his highly influential Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art) in 1764. In it he proposed a chronological development for ancient sculpture, with a four-stage scheme in which Roman art belonged in the final phase of imitative works (Greek sculpture populated the “best” periods). Winckelmann was the first to attempt to understand ancient cultures on the basis of their art alone. From this time onward, ancient Greece would increasingly occupy the minds of European intellectuals. Winckelmann was part of the wider intellectual trend known as the Counter-Enlightenment, which reacted against the accumulated knowledge and reason of contemporary intellectual practice. This new romanticism sought truth and beauty in spontaneous, natural creation; the age of ancient Greece was seen explicitly, for the first time, as the childhood of Europe, and Greek culture was considered the foundation of all European culture, especially among German, Protestant intellectuals. There were political and religious dimensions to these ideologies. The Catholic