Normal life
For Goethe, normal life is fairly fixed. He serves as an important person in his community. His life is defined by routine, by responsibility, by his daily encounters with the same people with their normal opinion of him. Even though he is an established person with a fairly enviable reputation, he is still gripped by normal life. As an artist and a free spirit, there is something confining about normal life to him, but also something comfortable.
Travel and the wilderness
When Goethe departs from his normal life, he must travel through the country to go anywhere, so he is subject to an experience that rivals the breadth of the ocean when a person stands staring from the beach. He crosses the long stretches of European plain to get to his Mediterranean destinations, and this constitutes an archetypal experience of the wilderness. He is often very far from any established cities, and the wilderness brings him very quickly into a sense of religious experience.
Italian cities
The old cities of Italy are full of history, even by Goethe's time, so they are a visual reminder of not just the timelessness of human culture, but the fixity of the human experience. Compared with the constantly evolving, regenerating wilderness, the cities of Italy are oddly specific, contained, and suggest a "normal" all their own. The cities are all a little different, but they share the mix of industry and history. He is encountering not just cities, but societies and cultures. He is encountering a broader experience of humanity.
The sublime
The journeys are sublime in Goethe's opinion, because although his experience is literal and true, it is still suggestive and strangely spiritual, or at least supernatural. He often feels haunted by his own waking consciousness, and sometimes, he remembers what the true object of that fascination is: he knows he will die one day. That fascination is a constant noise that he can always hear faintly, but when he is walking through the countryside or staring at an Italian port, he feels it more obviously, giving the whole journey an ominous, spiritual feel.
