Zenon Vantini
From Grand Tour to Package Holiday
by Pamela Sambrook
Paperback (No longer our product)
(May 2021)
ISBN: 9780718895761
6.1 x 9.17 inches
Price: $37.00
In stock
The extraordinary life of Zenon Vantini, highlighting his contrubution to the formative years of rail tourism.
In this remarkable study, Pamela Sambrook rescues from obscurity the contribution of a former member of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard to the development of specialist hotels and catering in the formative years of the railway network in England and France. In doing so, she interrogates what lies behind some of Zenon Vantini’s very real achievements, legacies and disasters. She asks how far he was driven by his familial background in Elba and his involvement in the political turmoil of early-nineteenth-century France, and to what extent his whole life was known to those around him. Vantini’s extraordinary life encapsulates the change between two very different worlds – the old imperial past and the new age of entrepreneurial risk-taking. Never shaking off his old political loyalties, he believed resolutely that the mobility afforded by railway travel would change Europe fundamentally. In the long view he was a component part in the very early years of an industry which revolutionised England and Europe more than did even his hero, Napoleon.
Pamela Sambrook is well known within the field of country-house research for her work on restoring domestic offices and rescuing something of the lives of servants. She has now retired from consultancy to the National Trust, English Heritage and private owners and from teaching adult education. Having written many books on domestic service, here she strikes out together with her subject, Zenon Vantini, into fields new to her – Napoleonic studies and railway history. ”
- By (author) Pamela Sambrook
Zenon Vantini grasped the opportunities presented by political and economic developments in nineteenth-century Europe in a truly exemplary fashion. On his native Elba, he encountered the exiled Napoleon, whom he joined for the Hundred Days. Then, having pursued domestic service in Britain, he conceived the idea of catering for railway travellers, via a chain of hotels that encompassed the continent. Vantini's fascinating transnational career is memorably explored by Pamela Sambrook in this engrossing study.Malcolm Crook, emeritus professor of French History, Keele UniversityThis was a most enjoyable read, highly informative and the book has page turning qualities making it difficult to put down. The excitement of the chase is not immediately apparent, but develops well before Napoleon enters stage left.Paul Anderton, former Adult Education Tutor, Keele UniversityZenon Vantini leased and managed the first railway-owned hotel (at Euston) and the first railway refreshment rooms (at Wolverton). He organised the first continental rail tours ten years before Thomas Cook. Probably no railway pioneer had a more unusual and exotic back-story, yet he is virtually unknown, even to specialist historians. This book fills a significant gap in transport history.Peter Brown, Transport historian, formerly reviews editor of the Journal of the Railway & Canal Historical Society
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