Italian Journey

Editor’s note Goethe left Carlsbad in secret in September 1786, aged thirty-seven, and spent until May 1788 in Italy, mostly in Rome with a journey to Naples and Sicily; the book came out in 1816 and 1817, nearly thirty years later, reworked from his diaries and letters of the time. It is a travel book by someone who had wanted to see Italy since childhood: Verona, Vicenza, Venice, the entry into Rome, Vesuvius, the Greek temples at Paestum, the gardens of Palermo, and in between a man who had run from his duties at the Weimar court and was deciding whether he was a painter or a writer. Expect long passages on geology and plants beside the art.