After the death of his wife, antiquarian Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758–1838) left his only child in England and embarked on a series of journeys through continental Europe in pursuit of 'novelty, pleasure and information' in order to assuage his grief. At the end of the 1780s he deliberately diverged from the more conventional tourist trail in favour of a route through the then less-documented areas of Italy and down into Sicily, using classical authors as his guides. This work, first published in 1819, draws heavily on his daily journal entries to elucidate areas and points of interest that he felt had been overlooked in previous guides to Italy. Quotations from Horace, Tacitus and Pliny pertaining to ancient sites and practices are frequently included in Hoare's narrative, and he meticulously recreates the journey from Rome to Brundisium described by Horace in his Satires.