English travellers in late 18th century Spain : eyewitness accounts

Abstract

My work will be a brief comment on three English Voyagers to Spain in the late 18th Century encompassing the years 1760-88, the approximate time span of the reign of Charles Ill. The three travellers are Joseph Becretti, Joseph Townsend and William Beckford. Joseph Baretti in fact is not English. He was born in Lombardy and was the son of a member of the Italian lesser nobility who was a successful architect in Turin. Baretti had lived in England for ten years before his 1760 voyage to Spain and was an intimate friend of Samuel Johnson and his literary circle of savants.