In 1580, immediately after the first edition of the Essays was published in Bordeaux, Montaigne left his castle and traveled for a full year through Germany and Switzerland until he reached Italy. Two hundred years before Goethe, the author attributed to his precursor, the grand tour, a decisive role in his personal development: it allowed him to expand his knowledge of Latin and Italian, and gave him the opportunity to discover places and customs he had only known through literature. But the manuscript of his Journal of Travel to Italy was only discovered and published in the 1770s before being lost during the French Revolution. This new annotated edition by Jordi Bayod recovers a unique document that is not only an essential appendix to the Essays due to the variety of topics it addresses and the digressive, seemingly whimsical nature of its interweaving, but also an extraordinary precedent for travel literature and a manifesto of cosmopolitanism.