Italian Journey: 1786-1788

In this diary, Goethe describes his trip to 18th-century Italy, his impressions of the countryside and the people, his fascination with Roman culture and Italian art. Goethe considered Italy the inspiration for poets and returned many times. His diary is more than a book about Italy. Goethe had many interests including biology, geology and archaeology, all of which show in his writing. Goethe also painted, and the 2-volume edition includes 40 of his original drawings and paintings.

Goethe's Italian journey came after ten hard years administering and working at Weimar. In these years his literary output contracted. The trip to Italy was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a dream inspired in part by his own father's earlier journey and love of Italy. In Italy Goethe found yet another side of his multifaceted self . He opened to the world and the light and to sensuous reality. His connection with Nature is a fundamental theme of his poetry and in Italy he found a Nature which seemed imbued with organic form and Art , and an Art imbued with Nature. In a sense leaving home enabled him to come home to a central side of himself. Goethe was a writer- scientist- artist whose central theme was his own inner development. This development took a dramatic turn for the good, and these journals of his Italian trip are a central part of ' the great confession' which was his work.

Those who love Goethe or love Italy or love traveling might have come across The Italian Journey, Goethe's late-in-life rendering of his experience "fleeing" Weimar and hopeless love to fulfill a lifelong dream of being in Italy. I can't say staying in Italy or visiting Italy or studying Italy because Goethe's quest was so much more profound and fundamental; in Italy Goethe hoped to BE. This diary and these letters, however, are Goethe's immediate impressions, un-editted and not reconsidered. These are his immediate considerations and his emotions expressed in the diary he wrote for Frau von Stein, the woman he loved more or less hopelessly for several years. I love both books, but this one, unlike Italian Journey, is not neatly refined and carved and considered from a mature viewpoint; this is full of the urgency and passion and longing that propelled Goethe across the Brenner and up the slopes of Vesuvius. It's just GREAT.

This has long been my favorite work by Goethe. It is very readable, which most people don't expect from Goethe, connecting him to his poetry and to Faust, etc. But the book reveals so much about him (the reader gets a sense that the man knows he will be evaluated by people hundreds of years hence) and it also leaves so much to the imagination. I can't recommend this book more highly. It contains the musings of a brilliant human being and is a singular travelogue of Italy.

This classic reveals much about Goethe, as well as about Italy. In observing the waves at the gulf of Naples he shows the extreme empiricism of his incursions into science, with beautiful words, of course. The portraits of Naples and Catania are still up to date in their essentials. I wish I had read this book before my long sojourn in that wonderful country.