1What you are looking at is the first edition of 34 private letters by an eighteenth-century Styrian nobleman, Count Ignaz Maria von Attems-Heiligenkreuz (the Younger), sent to his father back in Graz during his European Grand Tour. The edition consists of a critical transcription of all the letters, facsimiles of the original manuscript documents and accompanying studies relating to the documents and the Attems family.

2Count Ignaz Maria Attems-Heiligenkreuz (Graz, 1714 – Vienna, 1762), the founder of the branch of the Attems family with its seat at Slovenska Bistrica (Ger. Windisch Feistritz), spent four years abroad: from November 1734 to October 1738, the period strongly marked by the Polish succession war, which shaped the Austrian youth, too. From his native Graz in Styria Ignaz Attems travelled first to the North, to Würzburg and some other German towns, the first half of the year 1735 he studied in Prague and later he inscribed himself to the University of Leiden as candidatus iuris. In July 1737 he finished with his official university education and travelled to Belgium, France and finally to Italy, where he remained from late 1737 to September 1738. After his return to Graz he was appointed, starting in 1739, to a series of high positions in the Inner-Austrian government and the Habsburg court in Vienna.

3Until the second decade of the twenty-first century these letters were largely unknown to researchers. They were noticed only by two family historians: Franz Ilwof, in his printed book Die Grafen von Attems, published in 1897; and much later, in the mid-twentieth century, by a member of the family, Maria Viktoria Attems-Pallavicino, in her typewritten Familiengeschichte, today preserved within the Attems family archive in the Styrian Provincial Archives in Graz.

4Metoda Kokole came across these letters in 2014 as a result of researching a collection of music manuscripts once belonging to the family of the Attems counts from Slovenska Bistrica. A number of musical pieces, mostly copies of Italian opera arias, bear manuscript annotations, among which appears the name “Ignazio Conte d’Atthembs” and its French equivalent, “Ignace Compte d’Atthembs”. Some of these annotations indicate places and names of operas and even their composers, such as “In Roma. Alle Dame 1738. Il Quinto Fabio. Del Sig. Nicola Logroschino”, which clearly refers to a particular occasion when these materials were acquired. Further investigations into the family led me to its archive in Graz, where I read the letters and saw for myself the evidence for Ignaz’s Grand Tour and his active interest in musical life in the Italian cities that he visited in 1738.

5These letters were sent over a period of four years from twelve different European cities geographically extending from Prague, today the capital of the Czech Republic, to Würzburg, Mainz and Mannheim in central Germany, to Leiden and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and finally to Brussels and Paris in the Francophone zone and Bologna, Rome and Trieste in the Italian peninsula. Most numerous are the letters from Leiden, Würzburg and Prague: there are nine from Leiden and six from Würzburg and from Prague, the cities where Attems spent several months pursuing his studies at higher educational institutions.

6The young Styrian aristocrat was a keen observer of contemporary political, economic, religious and cultural life in the places he visited. His letters accordingly contain a wealth of information on his education, but they also constitute a rich source for the history of many more mundane aspects – routes, costs, transport, accommodation, health, clothing, university education, tutoring by a Hoffmaister, religious issues, economic debates and descriptions of the most celebrated sites and artistic wonders of the time. All these snippets of information are potentially useful to research in history, art, music, the social sciences etc. For general research on the European Grand Tour in the eighteenth century Attems’s letters represent one of the very rare well-documented cases so far discovered of such a tour undertaken by a member of an influential family from Inner Austria.

7The task of presenting the correspondence as a digital edition was possible due to collaboration of an international, multidisciplinary group of researchers. The research team, directed by Metoda Kokole and Gabriele Haug-Moritz, was established in late 2018, come from the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Metoda Kokole, Miha Preinfalk, Matija Ogrin and Željko Oset) and the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz (Gabriele Haug-Moritz, Marlies Raffler, Michael Walter and Florian Zeilinger) was established in late 2018. The group’s project, named “Culture and Politics in mid-eighteenth century Europe – the letters of Count Ignaz Maria von Attems-Heiligenkreuz to his father (1734–1738). A digital edition”, had the good fortune to gain the support of the Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Österreichs in 2019. This, then, is the first fruit of the project – one that it is hoped to follow with further original studies and commentaries.