Italian Journey
The Italian Journey is a travel report in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes his stay in Italy between September 1786 and May 1788. The two -part work based on his travel journals, but was only much later, 1813-1817. Besides poetry and truth and campaign in France, it is one of his autobiographical writings.
Chronologically matches the representation of the journey, the Goethe largely incognito undertook, with his diary, in contrast to these but stylized and purified from overly personal comments. However, despite the intensive subsequent revision of the Italian Journey preserves the form of a diary. This addressees begin in the course of the work to emerge: the first parts are directed to any particular reader, and later he turns explicitly to his "friends ", and finally to specific persons.
Content
Goethe began his trip to Italy in 1786, after he had previously been stopped three attempts at such a journey. He traveled (mostly by stagecoach and almost always alone) of Carlsbad via Eger, Regensburg, Munich, Mittenwald, Scharnitz, Seefeld, Zirl, Innsbruck and the Brenner, Bolzano, Trento to Lake Garda ( Torbole and Malcesine ), then on to Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Ferrara, Cento, Bologna, Loiano, Perugia, Terni and Città Castellana to Rome, where he remained for four months. Then he went, along with the painter Tischbein, on Velletri and Fondi to Naples. He remained there for almost five weeks, made two trips to the currently active Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii visited, Caserta, Capua, Herculaneum and Paestum. Then he sailed by boat to Sicily where he visited Palermo, Alcamo, Castelvetrano, Sciacca, Girgenti, Caltanissetta, Catania, Taormina and Messina. His return led him to re- Naples again to Rome. Here he holds still for almost a year on, visiting the surrounding area and is dedicated to while studying Ancient especially practical painting and drawing exercises and continuing his work as a writer before he went to Easter on the way home to Weimar. He comes over Siena, Florence (which he to go on the journey from impatience, and finally to Rome, had only grazed ), Bologna, Modena, Parma, Piacenza and Milan - stations which are however not commented in his Italian Journey.
The focus of his descriptions will change. Often dominate science, particularly mineralogy, but also meteorological, geological, geographical and botanical observations, not least: in the " public garden directly on the roads " of Palermo he sought eg according to the " archetypal plant " and believes there as he later wrote to Herder, the he has long sought-after " secret of the plants procreation and organization" to have come very close. Early on, that is, at least since his good two-week stay in Venice in October 1786, which is characterized by numerous visits to the theater, but also cultural issues come to the foreground of his report.
His artistic and architectural main interest is the ancient times in which he finds realized most fully the identity of natural and artificial law. The medieval and modern art, he brings against less interest. So he visited, for example, in Assisi is not about the famous Holy Sepulchre of St. Francis of Assisi, with frescoes by Giotto, but the converted into a Church, Temple, Santa Maria sopra Minerva in the main square of the city. Works of Michelangelo and Raphael, he admired indeed, they expressly describes only from an aesthetic point of view and ignoring the religious background.
Every now and then goes a Goethe on his own drawings, with which he tries to capture many of his impressions of the trip, as it photographically. He circles of artists, learn from them, and even playing with the idea, from the literary to become a painter. However, he recognizes from the outset its limits and committed instead to graphic documentation of his journey the young, recommended by Tischbein landscape painter Christoph Heinrich Kniep, who accompanied him since Naples and draws him a wealth of drawings. In his Italian period saw the completion and publication of Iphigenia in Tauris and work on Tasso, but also on Egmont and Faust.
Contacts with natives are only occasionally mentioned in the Italian travel. Although Goethe speaks about the differences between the Italian and the German mentality, makes this rarely on concrete acquaintances fixed, instead he describes his impression rather of the population as a whole. Basically, he is the Italian mentality and positive attitude towards life art and hopes some of it for themselves and be able to take his future life in Weimar. Even the Roman Carnival, he he feels first rejected both during his first and witnessed during his second Romaufenthalts and its noisy aggressiveness and primitiveness, he admits after intense reflections, which he analyzed in detail in several chapters of his travelogue, ultimately, a universal importance.
Goethe introduced the Italian travel the motto Et in Arcadia ego ( also in Arcadia I ) above, an indication that he regarded Italy as a real Arcadia. Italy was the scenery for him that generations of writers have sought and brought written before him in the wave of idylls and Arkadi literature of the 18th century and which he believed to have found in reality.