Before he ever became famous for his incomparable 1791 life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Scottish lawyer and would-be litterateur, was a best-selling author in England, thanks in large part to his time in French Corsica, following a tour of Italy.In 1768, Boswell published An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to That Island; and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli, and the book became a hit. Material for the book was collected during Boswell's Grand Tour of 1763-65, ostensibly undertaken to conduct “studies” on the Continent, visiting France and Switzerland (where he talked with Voltaire and Rousseau), Italy, Corsica, and Germany. During these voyages, he kept a diary, recorded his daily activities and expenditures, penned notes, and wrote many letters. From these materials it quickly becomes apparent that Boswell during his foray in continental Europe, most particularly during his stay in Italy, had three main concerns: religion, sex, and political power (not necessarily in that order), three subject that in the polite society of mid-18th century of English gentlemen were considered off-limits, at least publicly, and certainly were not written about for publication.We find that, particularly after he arrived in Italy, he was not a paragon of civic or moral virtues. His promiscuity, which resulted in the acquisition of sexually transmitted diseases, his frequent binge drinking, and his rationalizing of his misbehavior and faults – all these things plagued him throughout his adult life. He did have many faults, but he was honest enough to record them in his diary and papers, an unusual streak of truthfulness that makes us appreciate the man; just like a painter he portrayed himself with words, warts and allBorn into a strict Presbyterian household, Boswell quickly realized that he was not one for the strictures of the bleak Presbyterian theories of dutiful behavior and life, and in his early adulthood dabbled with Roman Catholicism, a religion that allowed for more flexible and humane theological practices – and had the added attraction of providing for recurrent repentance for the frequently wayward sinner.Boswell sinned a lot and repented regularly. After becoming a disciple of Rousseau, he meant for the Grand Tour to enable him to acquire knowledge and return to England a wise, mature, and cultured man. Somewhere around the afternoon of the first day, this plan began to go awry.The young twenty-four old already had a reputation as a womanizer. In an attempt to curb his son's already-excessive appetites, his stern father Lord Auchinclek sent the 19-year-old to prestigious Glasgow University, where he was the student of Adam Smith. Alas, an invisible hand soon drew him to the fleshpots of London, where he compensated for a hasty conversion to Catholicism by embarking on an affair with a married actress whom he'd first seen on stage in Edinburgh. An illegitimate child and a venereal disease later, the Continent beckoned.After a stay north of the Alps, there followed a nine-month stay in Italy, during which time country became for him not so much the seat of Catholic Christianity, home to the monuments of ancient Rome and the arts of the Renaissance and the Baroque, but rather a warm and inviting place full of “liberated” women who sold their favors for a fee and sometimes gave them away.He envisioned that he would be a cicisbeo, a gallant courtier and the lover of married women in the cities he visited. Except that he did not know the set rules of the game: cicisbei generally refrained from public displays of affection, speaking softly and being assiduously in the service of their beloved, and being faithful to them. Clearly Boswell did not qualify: he charged at his prey like a bull in a china shop and was always ready to stray to more verdant pastures. He had amorous adventures in every city he visited: Turin, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence, Siena, and many others, a rake's progress through the world's premiere tourist destinations.After making bumbling passes at various countesses in Turin, Boswell moved south toward Rome via Piacenza, Parma, Bologna, and along the Adriatic Riviera to Ancona, where his conscience started bothering him about his incessant whoring and he promised to himself that he would engage in “gallantry once a week.”Crossing the Apennines, he arrived in Rome on February 16, but only stayed a week since he was eager to proceed to Naples and join infamous British ex-pat and firebrand John Wilkes and Lord John Mountstuart, the son of Lord Bute, a former British Prime Minister, who was also on a grand tour of Europe. It almost goes without saying that when in Rome, Boswell's slim resolution of gallantry was enthusiastically abandoned. “Be a Spaniard: a girl every day!” he told himself and did his best to follow through.Leaving Rome of February 25, he arrived in Naples on March 2, after a five days journey. In Naples, Boswell did the tourist sights, mostly in the company of John Wilkes: he visited the royal palace at Portici, climbed Mount Vesuvius, and ambled through the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, then being excavated. He caroused about town with Lord Mountstuart, was a frequent guest of Sir William Hamilton, the English Ambassador to Naples, and gambled at the house of Ange and Sarah Goudar on the hill of Posillipo, above the Bay of Naples.Boswell was back in Rome by March 24 and this time stayed 11 weeks, until June 14. In Rome he met archeologist and art historian Johann Wincklemann, painter Angelica Kauffmann, society painter Pompeo Batoni, and members of the exiled English Stuart royal family, James III, the Old Pretender, his son, Bonnie Prince Charles, and the other son, Cardinal Henry Stuart. He also continued to indulge in romantic adventures, both in the company of Lord Mountsuart and on his own. His expenditure book dutifully records the progress of his girl-a-day goal, with periodic justifications: “These were the customs of the society in which I was,” he writes in a typically unconvincing passage, “and I have adapted myself to them.” He “sallied forth every evening like an imperious lion,” seeking, he told himself, to emulate the “rakish deeds of Horace and other amorous Roman poets.” The contradiction between chasing after street prostitutes and kissing the Pope's slippers during an audience he either did not see or did not care to resolve.Leaving Rome on June 14, Boswell headed to the east toward the Adriatic shores, stopping at Foligno and Loreto. Then he moved north, stopping at San Marino, Bologna, Ferrara, and Padua. Traveling with him was Lord Mountstuart, his chaperone, Colonel Edmondstone, and Professor M. Mallet of Geneva, who had been engaged to give instruction to Lord Mountstuart.Toward the end of June the party was in was in Venice, and saw the tourist sights. As usual, our hero courted an older woman, Madame Michieli, shared another woman with Mountstuart, and assiduously went out in search of others. He also met several times with literary critic Giuseppe Baretti, a friend of Dr. Johnson, who was getting ready to leave Venice after the authorities had suppressed the literary journal he edited, La Frusta Letteraria.In mid-July, Lord Bute recalled his son, Mountstuart, to London and the group left Venice; Boswell, bearing a letter of introduction from Mountstuart to one of his former lovers in Siena, headed for Tuscany, via Vicenza, Verona, Bergamo, and Mantua. He stayed in Florence for a while, dutifully doing the sights and arrived in Siena on August 24, staying there until September 29.In Siena he complained that after a week there he still had not seen anything. Of course, he did not have time for sightseeing, since he was busy trying to seduce the prominent Portia Sansedoni a 35 years old married woman and mother of three children, who had been his friend Mountstuart’s lover. The woman wanted to remain faithful to Mountstuart and Boswell tried to convince her to give in by saying, “My lord [Mountstuart] is built in such a way that he is not capable of being faithful, and does not expect loyalty from you.” But Sansedoni, although flattered by the attentions of the young man, had no intention of giving in. Repulsed, Boswell of course saw no hypocrisy about going, “into a Church and [kneeling] with great devotion before an Altar splendidly lighted up.”Boswell then thought he could make Sansedoni jealous by starting a love affair with Giroloma Piccolomini, but Portia did not pay heed to him anyway. Piccolomini, then thirty-seven, had been married for 17 years with the Captain of the People of Siena (equivalent to a mayor) and had four children. This time, Boswell’s attentions were crowned with success, and Piccolomini fell in love with the young Scot. Of course, his intentions toward her were not serious, and he knew that he would be leaving Siena soon, since his father was already pressing for him to cut short his extended foray abroad and return home (Boswell first tried to convince the old man that he was in Siena to perfect his Italian and then, in order to stay longer, moved within the city and failed to give his father the new address).On September 29, he finally left Siena for Lucca, Pisa, and Leghorn, where he embarked on a ship bound for Corsica. Girolama Piccolomini, who had come to love him deeply (one wonders why), for years continued to write to him letters, sometimes passionate, sometimes angry and contemptuous.Of an acquaintance he'd met on the Continent, Boswell wrote that the man was “a true bon Catholique, for he talked with ease of having women, and yet told me of a distemper he had brought on himself by fasting.” Something of this same contrast clung to Boswell himself during his time in Italy, where, he writes, his frame of mind was “amorous and pious.” Even after he'd returned to England, married, and made some attempt to settle into a respectable life, this man whom Macaulay immortally describes as “servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London” - this man was still a bundle of contradictions. He moved back to Scotland after his father died in 1782 and for a while thought of entering Scottish politics. However in 1784, right after Dr. Johnson had died, he decided to return to London and to start working on the biography of his esteemed friend, a work many critics (Macaulay included) rank as the best biography ever written in the English language.After Boswell’s death, the documents so carefully and honestly telling the story of his Grand Tour (during which, as one scholar put it, he had been “pedantic in Germany, philosophic in Switzerland, and amorous in Italy”) were hidden away by his heirs, ashamed of the scandalous tales Boswell so readily told about himself. Those heirs were content to enjoy the far more respectable immortality ascribed to the author of The Life of Johnson. But Boswell's Grand Tour came to light eventually just the same, and his seedy, sordid, bright, and vivid Italy came to life again, blemishes and all.____Luciano Mangiafico is a retired U.S. diplomat who served, among many postings abroad, as consul in Milan and Consul General in Palermo.
