Nietzsche's Journey to Sorrento: Genesis of the Philosophy of the Free Spirit by Paolo D'Iorio (review)

This quiet, elegant study gives us a Nietzsche without the rage. It focuses on the year 1876 when, having made the fateful decision to leave his post at Basel University, the thirty-two-year-old writer and classicist accepted an invitation to visit Sorrento in southern Italy from Malwida von Meysenbug, who belonged to the inner circle around Richard and Cosima Wagner. She was a sentimental writer of private means, who initially invited Nietzsche's student Albert Brenner to recuperate in Sorrento after an illness, and then Nietzsche came too. Nietzsche himself was already ill, with the intense headaches that would confine him to bed intermittently during his stay, and in retrospect Malwida was convinced that she had organized the trip, from October to the following April, for Nietzsche.

Paulo D'Iorio takes the decision, crucial to the tempo and lightness of his narrative, not to diagnose the syphilis that eventually will destroy the philosopher's sanity. The result is the most sociable Nietzsche you will ever meet, joining in discussions; going for long, shared walks through the breathtaking countryside; admiring sea and sky and an ubiquitous sense of the antique in its rightful place. Meysenbug rents a villa where Nietzsche relishes a large, shuttered second-floor room with a balcony. They are, in total, a party of four, whose visitors include, somewhat uneasily, the Wagners from nearby Naples.

Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872) in Wagner's honor. But it is the change that has come over him since then that fills his Sorrento notebooks. As he rejects the value of reason, he turns toward the defiant, art-driven vitalism that will fill the pages of Human, All Too Human.

D'Iorio has used archival material, including the "Sorrentiner Papiere," mostly by Brenner, and accounts of contemporary travelers who either met Nietzsche or passed close by. But, for me, it is the many photographs of the locality—along with the chance to compare Nietzsche's sharp, tightly controlled handwriting with his erstwhile friend Wagner's flowing screed—that evoke the time and place of a great event in Nietszche's life and confirm the charm of this project.