Napoleon's invasion of Italy encouraged members of the Society of Dilettanti, whose 'Grand Tour' normally took place in Italy, to find alternative destinations, and members of the society began to include Mycenae on their itineraries: seeing it, in the words of Cathy Gere, as 'the ultimate Romantic ruin.' In the early 19th century, local tradition held that the Treasury of Atreus had been once explored by the agha of the nearby village of Karvati, who took from it a bronze lamp. By this period, more of Mycenae's monuments were visible and known to European visitors. In 1802, the British aristocrat Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin visited Mycenae looking for antiquities that might be taken back to Britain. While he had originally sought to remove the sculpted relief of the Lion Gate, it proved too large to lift or transport, and so Elgin asked the voivode of Nafplio to clear the Treasury of Atreus, from which he removed fragments of pottery vases, ornamental stonework and a marble vase, as well as parts of its sculptural decoration. In June 1810, Veli Pasha, the Ottoman Pasha of the Morea, excavated the tomb, clearing most of the entrance, and entered the chamber with ladders; according to Heinrich Schliemann's later publication of his own excavations at Mycenae, he discovered 'bones covered with gold', as well as gemstones and other gold and silver objects. Veli Pasha removed four large fragments of the semi-engaged columns beside the doorway, some of which he gave as a gift to Howe Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, who visited him shortly after the excavations. In 1834, the site was surveyed and mapped by French troops. In 1841, Kyriakos Pittakis, working on behalf of the Archaeological Society of Athens, cleared the approach to the Lion Gate and made a tentative exploration of the Tomb of Clytemnestra. Schliemann's excavations (1874–1876) One archaeologist obsessed over this area for discovery in particular, named Heinrich Schliemann. From the time Schliemann was a young boy, he had the dream to one day discover the city of Troy, also the site of the Trojan war. Schliemann’s obsession began as a very young boy when his father would read him passages from Homer's epics, The Iliad and Odyssey. As Schliemann grew older, his dreams became a reality, in 1871 Schliemann began his excavations on the hill Hissarlik, located in Turkey. Schliemann worked for over three years before finding