HE road to London runs through Rome. Or so it did for Robert Adam, who left his native Scotland (and a place in the family’s established, but regional practice) for a European Grand Tour that eventually propelled him to worldwide architectural glory. Adam headed to Italy in 1754, at the age of 26, and became part of an international circle that included architectural designer Charles-Louis Clérisseau and artist and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He had ambition—‘Scotland is but a narrow place,’ he once wrote, revealing his desire for ‘a greater, more extensive and more honourable scene’—and the determination to pursue it, even when this required a rather elastic relationship with the truth: cultivating for a time the image of the distinguished dilettante, he embellished his stories with the odd, well-timed ‘lye’, as he openly admitted to his family.
