Politeness was a quintessentially urban concept; the formulation of a code of polite behaviour was a response to the pressures of urban living and the cultivation and display of polite manners took place in the social spaces of the urban locale. Not all towns were equally polite, however, and the degree of politeness on display in a town became another yardstick by which to categorise and judge provincial society. London was often presented as the centre of true politeness, in contrast to provincial vulgarity, but other towns were quick to appropriate the concept and its rhetoric as a means of self-promotion. In so doing politeness underwent modification as it was reinvented as a virtue of provincial, middling urban society.

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How did eighteenth-century travellers experience, describe and represent the urban environments they encountered as they made the Grand Tour? This fascinating book focuses on the changing responses of the British to the cities of Florence, Rome, Naples and Venice, during a period of unprecedented urbanisation at home. Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material, including travel accounts written by women, Rosemary Sweet explores how travel literature helped to create and perpetuate the image of a city; what the different meanings and imaginative associations attached to these cities were; and how the contrasting descriptions of each of these cities reflected the travellers' own attitudes to urbanism. More broadly, the book explores the construction and performance of personal, gender and national identities, and the shift in cultural values away from neo-classicism towards medievalism and the gothic, which is central to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and the transition to modernity.