Rome: First Impressions

EDITOR’S NOTE: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is the defining author of the German literary tradition and one of the commanding figures in Western intellectual and cultural history. Over the course of his wide-ranging career, he produced a remarkable array of fictional narratives, poems, and dramatic works, as well as autobiographical writings and essays in scientific analysis.

Born in Frankfurt, he pursued his education at the University of Leipzig and went on to complete studies in law at Strasbourg. When he was in his early thirties, his intense romantic novel entitled The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) became a worldwide sensation, and its influence has remained powerful up to the present day. This had been preceded by drafts of the first part of Faust in the early 1770s, though the play itself was not published until 1808. In part in recognition of his extraordinary ambition and achievements, Goethe was invited to accept the patronage of Duke Karl August in Weimar, where he remained until the end of this life and where he also served in a variety of administrative and diplomatic appointments.

His travels in Italy in 1786–1788, not long before the French Revolution, represented the fulfillment of a wish that he had long harbored, and the effect of his experiences there was to clarify, expand, and alter his taste and bring him into a decisive new relation to classical values and achievements. His detailed record of his observations appears in the Italienische Reise [Italian journey], published in 1816, which served as a virtual guidebook for Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1830s and has served a similar function for many who have made their way through Italy in Goethe’s wake. In this period abroad, Goethe produced a number of important dramas, including Iphigenia in Tauris (1787) and Torquato Tasso (1789). After his return to Weimar, he lived with Christiane Vulpius, with whom he had five children (only one survived); he married her in 1806. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [translated as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Thomas Carlyle, whose English renderings of Goethe’s works served to bring this author into Aglo-American literary consciousness] first appeared in 1796; the sequel to this Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering, was completed in 1828. In the later decades of Goethe’s life, he devoted his attention to a variety of scientific studies (including a treatise on color, which has recently captured the interest of contemporary physicists), and to the writing of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and truth, 1808–1831]; the second part of Faust appeared in 1831, a year before Goethe’s death in Weimar.

The pages that follow are taken from Goethe’s Travels in Italy: Together with His Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy, translated from German by A. J. Morrison and published by George Bell and Sons in London, 1885.

Rome: First Impressions

Rome November 1, 1786

At last I can speak out, and greet my friends with good humour. May they pardon my secrecy, and what has been, as it were, a subterranean journey hither. For scarcely to myself did I venture to say whither I was hurrying—even on the road I often had my fears, and it was only as I passed under the Porta del Popolo that I felt certain of reaching Rome.

And now let me also say that a thousand times—aye, at all times, do I think of you, in the neighbourhood of these objects which I never believed I should visit alone. It was only when I saw every one bound body and soul to the north, and all longing for those countries utterly extinct among them that I resolved to undertake the long solitary journey, and to seek that centre towards which I was attracted by an irresistible impulse. Indeed for the few last years it had become with me a kind of disease, which could only be cured by the sight and presence of the absent object. Now, at length I may venture to confess the truth: it reached at last such a height...