As unique as they are, Rome and Venice share a common territory – their textuality. The cities function not only as real places but also literary spaces made of all that has been written on them. Pfister and Schaff call Venice ‘a virtual palimpsest of texts, which have appropriated the place and refashioned it in their own terms throughout the centuries’ (Pfister and Schaff 1999, 1), and the same may be said of Rome. On entering the cities, English visitors instantly compare them to the images, verses and statements echoing in their heads. Blessington, too, reflects that the scenes beheld in Venice ‘realized some of the descriptions […] read years ago; […] I could have fancied that no change had occurred since the descriptions I referred to were written’ (IiI 3: 109– 10). As I will show, being too deeply immersed in the literary context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Blessington hardly makes an attempt to write the cities again in her account.

No traveller has ever attempted to describe all that Rome offers. Blessington's first nine- day stay in Rome – on her way from Florence to Naples – is described on merely twenty pages and constitutes an essence of what travellers would usually limit themselves to, especially when hurried by the heat and the threat of malaria (IiI 2: 178). Blessington typically begins her account of the Eternal City depicting the first view of St Peter's from the hill above Baccano. Even though she assures the reader she was determined not to ‘indulge in the enthusiasm peculiar to female travelers’, she recollects that, as ‘her heart beat quicker’, she found it very hard to ‘suppress the expressions of delight’ rising to her lips. She thus already signals that, much as she may try, she will not be able to resist viewing and describing the city as her predecessors did.

On entering the city, Blessington is struck by the contrast between the deserted Campagna she has traversed and the gaiety of the people flocking in the Corso: ‘It was not thus that I wished my first impression of Rome to be taken’ (IiI 2: 164). Definitely, hers are not the feelings accompanying ‘the gay throng’ residing in the city, but rather of those British travellers whose recollections are evoked in her ‘solemn associations’.