 This is, I think, absolutely wonderful. He's basically arranging in one drawing what he's doing in all the other drawings. So he's meditating upon his own learning curve in Rome. That's a fantastic image. This project is about the digitisation of the Adam Brothers' grand tour letters. Anyone who wants to understand Robert Adam's development as an architect has to consult this extraordinary series of letters that he and his brother James wrote during the respective grand tours in the 1750s and 60s. Pretty extraordinary because this is really the last great collection of 18th century letters still to be published. It's the most transformative experience of his life. He's absolutely galvanised by the grandeur of the remains of ancient Rome and he sees this as a possible pathway to new knowledge, to new understanding and it awakens in a sense of his true destiny. One of the greatest discoveries that we have made so far is actually not a letter. So it's not the recto, the front of a letter, but it's the verso, so the back of a letter. And this is a letter that Robert wrote to his brothers and on the back of this letter he really gives an advice to future travellers to Rome on what to study. Advice to intending travellers, study where mountainous temples, the godet antiquities draw figures from the admiral de Romanarum and all manner of foliage and really in these few lines you have some of the essential ingredients of Robert Adam's style. These are the three main sources that are mentioned by Robert Adam in this early letter in Rome. So the montano, tempietti, the godet, les edifices antiques de Rome and the admiral de Romanarum antiquitatum by Belloni and Bartoli. Why are these three books so important? Your archetypal, your classical architect who's driven by archaeological accuracy would not be interested in montano because his work is quite idiosyncratic and unusual. Montano actually gives a series of small temples from classical antiquity and reproduced them in this wonderful combination of plan, elevation and section and these are extremely varied. So you get an enormous amount of variety and complexity in plan, elevation, etc. So Robert and James Adam are among the greatest architects of 18th century Britain and I will say 18th century Europe in general. In terms of interior decoration, mostly in terms of interior decoration they really invented with few other architects the neoclassical interior. He wants to come back from his grand tour with a publication of his own to show the technologies acquired, to show that he's now a leading expert in interpreting antiquity and one of the first things he thinks of doing is producing a new edition of this Dego Day book on Roman antiquities and his idea is that he's got drafts drawing the monuments and to have accurate measurements and he will show in the volume where the corrections are made to the measurements to prove just how good he is. From one room to the other in a country house and you get completely different plan, completely different elevation completely different materials and colours. It's an architecture that you experience through the senses rather than with the intellect. Adriano and I both know the letters quite well. We've used them in our research in the past but we have never read all of them from beginning to end and I don't think anyone has. So we don't actually know until we do that what is in them and so there will be information there for any student of Adam any student of neoclasticism any student of Rome or Italy in the 18th century of the grand tour of even things like how do you go about sending back enormous statues or marble tables from Rome to Britain at a time of war. All the details of that information how it was done, whether it was sent to how much it cost to do it is all embedded in these letters. What we want to do is to put them online annotate them and make them available for a wide audience because this repository of letters can in a way bring you in because you really read the voice of those who were there and when you touch this letter and as any researcher will know you really have a direct experience with the past. It's a filtered experience because we interpret the past as we wish but really when you touch the letters and you hear the voices of people who were there in Rome the Academy of Europe in the 1750s you get a much more direct idea and experience of what must have been.