Perched on the top of steep hills, adorned by churches and chapels and often dominated by fortifications, Italian villages had long fascinated travellers. However, their location and appalling road conditions meant that most villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth century remained unexplored and merely glimpsed from the roadside. But villages on main roads such as the Bocchetta and Giovi roads in Liguria, or the main alpine passes of Piedmont and Valle d’Aosta, were frequently depicted by British artists and travellers and described in contemporary road books, especially if they had post houses or hotels. Travellers often emphasise the poverty and poor health of inhabitants and the decaying buildings. While travelling along the Bracco road between Genoa and Tuscany William Brockedon reported that the village of Mattarana had a ‘cut-throat looking aspect, – dirty, dreary, and miserable; the people appear savage; and physiognomy is a humbug if they are honest’. Travellers in the Valle d’Aosta often noted the large number of cases of cretinism, which, according to William King, ‘in the many loathsome forms it assumes, of besotted vacancy, dwarfed elfishness, hideous disproportion, and generally conscious degradation, affecting every fourth person one meets, is the most melancholy spectacle of the defacement of God’s own image which the world can present’. Aosta is ‘the head quarter of these frightful maladies, which more or less affect half of the population from Villenueve to Châtillon’. King queried the reason for the high occurrence of cases, commenting that people from the valley attribute it ‘to the filthy habits of the lower classes, who live in miserable dark hovels, along with animals, never changing their clothes or dreaming of washing’. He noticed, however, that ‘the people of Aosta are not more filthy than many other Italians or even Irish’.

Topographical artists took advantages of stops at post houses during their trips to depict the most picturesque aspects of these less-known Italian landscapes, particularly before roads were improved and railway lines established. This is, for example, the case of amateur artists such as William Strangways, Elizabeth Fanshawe or Elizabeth Jenkinson in Liguria; they all crossed the region in the first half of the century and produced detailed topographical views of villages, churches and castles.