September 3, 1786
I slipped out of Carlsbad at three in the morning; otherwise I would not have been allowed to leave. The band of friends who, on the 28th of August, rejoiced to celebrate my birthday, had in some degree acquired a right to detain me, but I could wait no longer.
With these words on this date, Goethe officially begins his travel journal. He was thirty-seven and due to the tremendous success of his novel The Sorrows of Werther had been one of the most famous writers in the world for the past decade. Despite the early success, however, Goethe felt stifled and trapped within circumstances. A break was needed and thus the characterization of his trip to Italy as a flight or escape.
October 9
If only they would keep their city cleaner! It may be forbidden, under severe penalties, to empty garbage into the canals, but that does not prevent a sudden downpour from sweeping into them all the rubbish that has accumulated at the street corners.
As a tourist manual, Goethe’s travel diary likely leaves something to be desired by the Venice Visitor Bureau. One of his first observations about the famously romantic city which he recorded upon arrival in August is “So much as been said and written about Venice already that I do not want to describe it too minutely.” By October, it appears he has changed his perspective. To be sure, the bulk of his account is a glowing report on the city made famous for its gondolas, but it seems a person can only enjoy the theoretical ideals of romance before the reality becomes simply too much to bear.
February 25
Naples proclaims herself from the first as gay, free and alive. A numberless host is running hither and thither in all directions, the King is away hunting, the Queen is pregnant and all is right with the world.
Remember at the end of the movie A Christmas Story when Ralph is lying there in bed snug up against his Red Ryder rifle and declares that “all is right with the world.” For Goethe, it seems that Naples was the official carbine action rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time for Italy. This particular passage is written with the same densely metaphorical flight of fanciful whimsy as Ralphie’s fantasia upon a Christmas. It is notable because it is such a rarity. Not that a writer as gifted with poetic notions as Goethe does not show off in the journal throughout, but there is something very idiosyncratic about the burst of almost amphetamine-inspired joy and rapture running throughout this excerpt.
August 23
Until you have seen the Sistine Chapel, you can have no adequate conception of what man is capable of accomplishing.
Something about the Sistine Chapel must have really gotten into Goethe’s head. He first visited the Sistine Chapel in November and then again the following December. February mandated a return to enjoy the blessing of the candles. He would make several return trips, including those made in March of the following year. The majesty and spirituality and sheer hard work that went into its architecture and the paintings on the ceiling by Michelangelo all conspired to instill in him a sense of potential and possibility. In retrospect, this statement almost seems to have a self-deprecating quality to it because it was written, after all, by the man who would some short time later deliver to the world one of its greatest literary accomplishment with his interpretation of the legend of Faust.
