From the Archives

In 1931, a twenty-one-year-old Natalie Mai Coe was off to see the world. Accompanied by her chaperone, Mrs. Roy C. Megargel, the young Miss Coe set out on her grand tour, traveling throughout Europe and North Africa. A tradition that that began in the late seventeenth century among the European upper class, the grand tour custom continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as industrialization enabled wealthy Gilded Age Americans to send their sons and daughters abroad to gain exposure to “Old World” culture and society.

Wealthy young American tourists roamed in search of an illustrious, ancient past in Greece, Italy, and Near Eastern countries and contemporary sophistication in France, Germany, and Switzerland, often with a chaperone. The grand tour took more time and covered more ground than family trips to the American West, Canada, or England. Natalie Coe’s tour lasted several years; she and Mrs. Megargel returned home for good to New York in 1934. Their itinerary took them to France, Germany, Italy, and as far east as Egypt. Letters and telegrams in the Planting Fields Archives trace the correspondence between Natalie, her father, and her Italian suitor, Leonardo Vitetti, throughout her grand tour.

The word grand pointed to something more than a complex itinerary: the touring young person was expected to couple the experience of international exposure with refined growth. The grand tourist was tasked with learning the mores of polite society, distinguishing taste from frivolity, and cultivating an interest in and ability to speak to historical political systems, classical literature, and the arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture). This store of knowledge was meant to burnish their reputation abroad and within their domestic social circles. Natalie’s travels no doubt helped prepare her for her as the wife of Count Leonardo Vitetti, an Italian diplomat and scholar of medieval Italian poetry who served as Italy’s delegate to the United Nations in the 1950s. The couple married in May 1934, not long after Natalie returned, a bit grander, from her tour.

–Caitlin Colban-Waldron, Archivist and Meredith A. Brown, Director of Museum Affairs