The Augustans generally disparaged modern Italy as an impoverished and benighted land of physical and moral decay, the mere ruin of a glorious classical antiquity, as in Joseph Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), Samuel Sharp's Letters from Italy (1766) and Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766). Young gentlemen on the Grand Tour were usually accompanied by a tutor or ‘bear leader’ to safeguard them against what passed for Italian vice, seduction by lascivious women or corruption by effeminate male homosexuality. The cyclic Augustan view of history imagined a second (French and English) peak of Augustan civilization after the relapse of the first (Latin) Augustan civilization into the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, whereas Italy had not been capable of such a regeneration and the Florentine Renaissance of the fifteenth century had soon decayed into primitive ignorance again, due to the enslavement of Italy by the superstitions of the Church of Rome and the occupation of Italy by the tyranny of other nations: ‘In the last century both arts and literature began to decline. The study of the classics was neglected … Thus ignorance spread little by little, and in the eighteenth century plunged that fine country into the barbarism of the middle ages’.

About the middle of the eighteenth century, between 1760 and 1770, however, that negative view of modern Italy had begun to change.