Italian Journey

"I felt I had to choose one of Goethe’s autobiographical works. The obvious choice would have been Poetry and Truth , the volume of his autobiography that treats his childhood and youth. But I chose the Italian Journey because his Italian sojourn in 1786-7 was the crucial turning point in Goethe’s life. It’s the experience that takes Goethe outside the German cultural milieu, outside the German climate, outside a certain social and moral rigidity. One feature that one should know about Goethe is that he was not a poor man. He was not a struggling writer. He had financial means; he could set himself up in a nice apartment; he could buy a huge amount of artwork; he could hire an artist to make drawings for him as he travelled around Italy. The journey transformed him in many ways. In fact, the Italian Journey is the diagram of an intellectual and artistic rebirth. Throughout we feel this sense of self-transformation, the release from certain psychological problems, the gradual acquisition of a different understanding of the world. In Italy, Goethe achieved a kind of clarity in his relationship to the world and to other human beings. That’s one of the dramas that’s taking place in the Italian Journey , which includes diary entries and letters to his friends in Weimar. As readers, we can follow Goethe from city to city. We can view, through his eyes, architectural masterpieces, works of art, festivals; we can accompany him as he sails to Sicily and stare with him into the steaming depths of Vesuvius. Life in Italy is public, a sort of festival life beneath the sun and in the openness of urban space. Intellectually speaking, there are two fundamental streams to follow. One of them is Goethe’s engagement with art and cultural practice. I would label his interest ‘anthropological’—attentive to how human communities form their lives. An important product of this interest is a study of the Roman Carnival that deserves recognition as the founding document of rigorous cultural-anthropological analysis. It is an attempt to disclose the structural logic inherent in the practice. Goethe wrote it up in a brief treatise that he had published while still in Italy. It’s a wonderful little book with some lovely illustrations. This interpretation of a mode of life is expressed in Goethe’s engagement with art and architecture. One of the decisive influences is his encounter with the architecture of Palladio. The engagement with Palladio’s faithful and yet transformative inheritance of antiquity becomes a guiding beacon for Goethe’s own art and thought. The Italian Journey is often referred to as the journey that led to Goethe’s so-called ‘classicism’. That term is too rigid. The important thing is to see that the art of antiquity and the Renaissance provided Goethe a pathway to his own artistic project. The second stream for readers to follow is the course of Goethe’s scientific development. The man’s curiosity knows no bounds. He gathers stones, looks at fish, studies atmospheric effects, peers into volcanic depths. It was in Italy that Goethe formulated the key idea of his scientific studies. It appears here as the idea of the archetype according to which all plants are formed: the ‘primal plant’ or Urpflanze . This is the key notion of Goethe’s morphology, which in the course of his life will develop into an encompassing vision of natural process. So, the great thing about the Italian Journey is that we accompany Goethe through a twofold intellectual revolution. As soon as the pandemic is over and we can travel again, I recommend taking this book to Italy and comparing your own experience with Goethe’s. That’s a really good question. First of all, I would say it is writing that maintains a high degree of immediacy because of its day-to-day narrative form. In large part, it’s based on what he was writing for his friends in Weimar so there’s great immediacy in the account. It’s quite supple and fresh and rich in introspective insight. What we’re seeing is the actual process of discovery, rather than an objective depiction of what’s discovered. I think that is crucial. There is great variety in the writing, which sometimes stretches out into novella-like sequences. And unforgettable figures appear, for example, Emma, Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Lord Nelson and for Goethe a figure of great fascination."