User talk:Qexigator/Books/Villa Giulia, Palermo

GOETHE'S "Italian Journey" includes his account of his visit to Palermo's botanic garden (see article "Villa Giulia (Palermo)"). Below is an abridgement of the Italian Journey article.

"Italian Journey" (in the German original: Italienische Reise) is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's report on his travels to Italy from 1786–88, published in 1816–17. The book is based on Goethe's diaries, and augmented with the addition of afterthoughts and reminiscences.

At the beginning of September 1786, when Goethe had just turned thirty-seven, he "slipped away", in his words, from his duties as Privy Councillor in the Duchy of Weimar, from a long platonic affair with a court lady, and from his immense fame as the author of the novel Werther and the stormy play Götz von Berlichingen, and took what became a licensed leave of absence. By May 1788 he had travelled to Italy via Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass and visited Lake Garda, Verona, Vicenza, Venice, Bologna, Rome and Alban Hills, Naples and Sicily. He wrote many letters to a number of friends in Germany, which he later used as the basis for Italian Journey.

Italian Journey initially takes the form of a diary, with events and descriptions written up apparently quite soon after they were experienced. The impression is in one sense true, since Goethe was clearly working from journals and letters he composed at the time — and by the end of the book he is openly distinguishing between his old correspondence and what he calls reporting. But there is also a strong and indeed elegant sense of fiction about the whole, a sort of composed immediacy. Goethe said in a letter that the work was "both entirely truthful and a graceful fairy-tale". It had to be something of a fairy-tale, since it was written between thirty and more than forty years after the journey, in 1816 and 1828-29.

The work begins with a famous Latin tag, Et in Arcadia ego, although originally Goethe used the German translation, Auch ich in Arkadien, which alters the meaning. The Latin phrase is usually imagined as spoken by Death — this is its sense, for example, in W. H. Auden's poem called "Et in Arcadia ego" — suggesting that every paradise is afflicted by mortality. Conversely, what Goethe's Auch ich in Arkadien says is "Even I managed to get to paradise", with the implication that we could all get there if we chose. If death is universal, the possibility of paradise might be universal too. This possibility wouldn't preclude its loss, and might even require it, or at least require that some of us should lose it. The book ends with a quotation from Ovid's Tristia, regretting his expulsion from Rome. Cum repeto noctem, Goethe writes in the middle of his own German, as well as citing a whole passage: "When I remember the night..." He is already storing up not only plentiful nostalgia and regret, but also a more complicated treasure: the certainty that he didn't merely imagine the land where others live happily ever after.

"We are all pilgrims who seek Italy", Goethe wrote in a poem two years after his return to Germany from his almost two-year spell in the land he had long dreamed of. For Goethe, Italy was the warm passionate south as opposed to the dank cautious north; the place where the classical past was still alive, although in ruins; a sequence of landscapes, colours, trees, manners, cities, monuments he had so far seen only in his writing. He described himself as "the mortal enemy of mere words" or what he also called "empty names". He needed to fill the names with meaning and, as he rather strangely put it, "to discover myself in the objects I see", literally "to learn to know myself by or through the objects". He also writes of his old habit of "clinging to the objects", which pays off in the new location. He wanted to know that what he thought might be paradise actually existed, even if it wasn't entirely paradise, and even if he didn't in the end want to stay there.