In the previous chapter we have seen how the multifaceted experience of the Grand Tour provided British travellers with a visual grammar to appreciate the Alpine landscape. In this chapter I am going to reconstruct the context of the geographical discovery of the dolomite rock and the position of the so-called Venetian Alps in the geological debates of the first part of the nineteenth century. This discovery will be seminal in providing British travellers with a new picturesque toolkit to see and promote the Dolomite landscape as a new tourist destination. The ingredients, however, which made that promotion possible, were neither entirely British nor entirely contained within the experience of the Venetian Grand Tour. Before being ‘invented’ the Dolomites needed to be ‘discovered’ – their unique landscape features needed to be noticed before they could be seen. They needed, in short, to be put on a map.

What made them noticeable to the international community was neither a painting, nor a poem, nor a piece of theatre, nor a memorable event that happened there in ancient or recent history. Those nameless mountains, variously dubbed ‘Friuli's Mountains’, ‘Rhætian Hills’, ‘Tyrolese Alps’, ‘Mystic Mountains’, ‘Pale Mountains’, ‘Venetian Alps’, and so on, were in fact lacking a ‘sponsor’.