A Trip Remembered · September 1786
“Italy without Sicily leaves no image on the soul: here is the key to all.” — Goethe, Palermo, 13 April 1787
At three o’clock in the morning of 3 September 1786, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, thirty-seven and for ten years a minister at the court of Weimar, slipped out of the spa town of Carlsbad without telling his friends where he was going. He travelled alone, under another name, with a portmanteau, a knapsack and an unfinished play.
He was gone for almost two years. He crossed the Alps, came down by Lake Garda to Verona, Venice and Rome, went on to Naples and Sicily, and lived in Rome again for most of a year before going home. Later he made a book of the letters and diaries he kept on the way, the Italian Journey.
Sources: Goethe, Travels in Italy, trans. A. J. W. Morrison (London, 1881; Project Gutenberg #53205) and Italienische Reise (Project Gutenberg #2404, #2405); James Sime, Life of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (London, 1888); Casa di Goethe, Rome; Städel Museum, Frankfurt; Goethezeitportal, “TimeLine von Goethes Italienreise”; Università di Padova, Il Bo Live. Images: Wikimedia Commons, public domain or CC0 — Tischbein (1787); Goethe’s own drawings; Bellotto; Canaletto; Piranesi (The Met); Angelika Kauffmann (1787); Hackert; Ducros (Rijksmuseum); Aloja after Hackert (Rijksmuseum).
The spa town in Bohemia, now Karlovy Vary, where his friends had just celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday. He left by post-chaise before dawn: “As early as 3 o’clock in the morning I stole out of Carlsbad, for otherwise I should not have been allowed to depart quietly.”
Over the Alps on 8 September. He had left Mittenwald at six in the morning and the cold felt like February. On the pass he saw larches for the first time. In his luggage was the unfinished Iphigenia, which he rewrote in verse on the road.
Blown into harbour by the wind, he sat in the old castle’s courtyard on 14 September and began to draw the tower. A crowd gathered; a man tore up his drawing; the town official was called, and the stranger was suspected of spying for the Emperor. “I replied that I was copying the old tower, that I might have some remembrance of Malsesine.” A local man who had worked in Frankfurt vouched for him, and he ended the day in that man’s vineyard.
The Roman amphitheatre, the Arena, was the first great monument of antiquity he had seen. He thought it had been built for the people to see themselves gathered together.
A week among Palladio’s buildings. The Teatro Olimpico was, he wrote, a theatre of the ancients on a small scale, “indescribably beautiful”; at the villa La Rotonda he described the plan, a square around a round hall.
In the botanical garden on 27 September the variety of the southern plants set him thinking: “the idea that all forms of plants may, perhaps, be developed from a single form, becomes more lively than ever.” A fan palm planted in that garden in 1585 is still there, and is called the Palma di Goethe.
He came into the lagoon from the Brenta at five in the afternoon on 28 September. The gondolas reminded him of a toy one his father had brought back from Italy. Two days later, from the bell tower of St Mark’s, he saw the sea for the first time.
“So now, Heaven be praised, Venice is no longer to me a bare and a hollow name.”
Ferrara, on 16 October, seemed empty and melancholy. In Bologna, Raphael’s St Agatha became his model for Iphigenia: his heroine should say nothing the saint might not. Then the Apennines, and only three hours in Florence — he was in a hurry for Rome.
He entered Rome through this gate on 29 October 1786: “it was only as I passed under the Porta del Popolo that I felt certain of reaching Rome.”
He lodged with the painter Tischbein and two other painters in a house on the Corso, opposite the Palazzo Rondanini. The apartment is now a museum, the Casa di Goethe. He would count the day he entered Rome as a second birthday: “a true new birth from the day that I entered Rome.”
At the end of December Tischbein stretched a large canvas for a life-size portrait: Goethe in a white cloak, sitting on a fallen obelisk among the ruins. The painting is in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. The museum points out that he seems to have two left feet.
He arrived on 25 February 1787 with Tischbein. “Naples is a paradise: in it every one lives in a sort of intoxicated self-forgetfulness. It is even so with me; I scarcely know myself — I seem quite an altered man.”
He went up three times: on 2 March in cloud, on 6 March with a reluctant Tischbein, and on 20 March to watch a stream of lava. His friend the painter Philipp Hackert, who had painted the eruption of 1774, gave him drawing lessons that month at the royal palace of Caserta.
Four days at sea from Naples, seasick most of the way, with the painter Kniep as his draughtsman. In the public garden by the harbour he went looking for the “primordial plant” behind all plants. And on 13 April he wrote: “Italy without Sicily leaves no image on the soul: here is the key to all.”
From his window he watched the sun go down on the Temple of Concord and the ruins of the Temple of Juno, a spring view, he wrote, that would never meet their eyes again in one lifetime.
On 7 May he climbed to the top seats of the ancient theatre. No audience in any theatre, he thought, had ever had such a view: the town, the castles, the long ridge of Etna, and the sea.
Back on 6 June 1787, for almost a year. He finished Egmont, took up Faust again, and sat for Angelika Kauffmann, who made, he said, a handsome fellow of him, but no trace of himself. On his last night in April 1788 he walked by moonlight to the Capitol and the Colosseum.
He came back by Siena, Florence, Bologna, Parma and Milan, and reached Weimar on 18 June 1788. In July he met Christiane Vulpius, who would become his wife.
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