The city walk is a device known among satirists since the days of Juvenal. English satirists in the Renaissance frequently elaborated on the device, to the point of shaping it into both an imaginary and real itinerary, as in the little known satires of Everard Guilpin in the 1590s. Yet the creation of these walks to and from the city and the court, including the satires by Guilpin’s more well-known friend John Donne, were also intimately connected with aspects of class ambition and upward striving: for the ambitious young men of Donne’s and Guilpin’s generation, the itinerary was also a social one – a path to success, although fraught with uncertainties and apprehensions about one’s future and career. As the examples of many Elizabethan satirists show, such uncertainties were often well-founded even if some satirists, like Donne, were successful in their professional life. Satire in other words both thrives on and founders on aspects of mobility, and the satirists’ itineraries of urban or courtly space do not only serve the purpose of ridiculing decadence and hypocrisy, they also, more obliquely, chart the satirists’ own uncertain road to social promotion. In fact, in some cases physical movement also becomes an index to the insecurity of the satirist’s social position, as in the case of Thomas Nashe, whose movement outside London to Great Yarmouth and the Isle of Wight were the results of his overstepping the mark as a satirical pamphlet writer. Again, therefore, satirical itineraries could chart both social success and the social downfall of the satirist.