Collecting was an important pastime for Grand Tourists. A class signifier of wealth and culture, the justification for building large private collections encompassed a spectrum from fashion to scientific research. While expensive souvenirs marketed to tourists could be readily purchased, the dilettante distinguished themselves among their peers by seeking out cultural artefacts and natural history specimens in the pursuit of knowledge. For the amateur historian or archaeologist, travelling to sites where objects buried for centuries were being exhumed added another level of authenticity to the experience of discovery. Contributing to this were the number of famous excavations being undertaken during the eighteenth century, such as those at Herculaneum and Pompeii near Naples, which began in 1738 and 1748.
The practice of disturbing tombs and removing burial goods, statuary and artworks , whether for the purpose of scientific research or connoisseurship, was highly problematic, even at the time. Reliant on largely unrecognised local expertise and labour, it necessitated the ability of well-connected collectors to evade regionally specific laws banning the export of antiquities. Through loopholes in the law and outright theft, huge collections were amassed and removed to Britain and elsewhere, where they often ended up in the collections of national cultural institutions.