Landmarks & Legacies - Grand Tour of Italy

The Society’s holdings comprise over 2,500 items specifically relating to the historical geography of Italy, dating from the 16th century to the present day. Highlights include an Italian astrolabe from 1500, early maps of Italy by Italian cartographers, such as Antonio Lafreri, Vincenzo Coronelli and Giovanni Antonio Magini, and a Portolan chart of Sicily dating from approximately 1600.

In the footsteps: Eric Newby-Price | In the footsteps: Thomas Donald McLeish 

In the footsteps of: Eric Newby

Eric Newby was one of the most prolific contributors to travel writing and photography in the 20th century, writing over 25 books and taking striking photographs of the people and places he encountered. His adventures began at the age of 18 when he joined the four-masted Finnish barque, Moshulu, and engaged in the 30,000 mile round-trip grain trade race between Ireland and Australia, which he vividly described in his first book, The Last Grain Race (1956).
Newby served with the elite Special Boat Section during World War II. Captured during an operation off the Italian coast in 1942, he spent a year in a prisoner of war camp, before escaping. Hiding in the Po Valley, he met a young Italian-Slovenian woman named Wanda Skof, whom he later married, and who would become his equal partner on many of his later travels. His memoir of that time, Love and War in the Apennines (1971) became one of his most acclaimed books. Wanda and Eric returned to Italy in 1967 when they bought a derelict farmhouse in the Apuan Alps. Newby’s humorous and affectionate account of their experience was published in ‘A small Place in Italy’ (1994).

In the footsteps of: Thomas Donald McLeish

Thomas McLeish, born in London in 1879, had a passion for photography. He began work at a photographic studio before teaching photography at the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London in 1900. Ten years later, he began work as a freelance photographer and soon carved out his reputation by supplying his photographs to journals such as the Illustrated London News, Country Life and National Geographic. 
In 1916 he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and was deployed to photograph Port Said, Egypt, where he captured some of the earliest aerial war pictures of the First World War. After the war he travelled widely, visiting large parts of Europe and the Middle East, accumulating a vast catalogue of approximately 3,000 photographs. McLeish travelled to Italy in 1920 and later in 1934, where he took a series of striking black and white photographs of the landscapes and architectural features of the country’s historical sites and cities.