Italian Journey is the report of Goethe's trip in Italy from 1786 to 1788. His journey was a kind of escape from his work as a minister in Weimar. Consequently, on September 3rd, at three o'clock in the morning, he left Karlsbad (Germany) with a mail coach, traveling at first under a false name (Philipp Möller): he didn't want to be recognized, and, for a long time, even his mother and his closest friends had no news of him.
Goethe spent his first days in Veneto, a Northern Italian region, visiting, particularly, Verona, Padua and Venice. Seeing Venice was for him a culmination of a dream and, there, he was able to watch the sea for the first time in his life. Despite of this, Goethe criticized the lack of cleanliness of the Northeastern Italy city.
Then he moved to Ferrara, where he could see Ludovico Ariosto's grave, and, after this, he visited Florence but only for a few hours, because he was eager to reach Rome before All Saints' Day. Finally Goethe managed to get to Rome, in which he stayed for 4 months, meeting eminent artistic personalities, like Carlo Maratta, Heinrich Meyer and Angelica Kauffman.
On February 25th 1787, he moved to Naples with his friend Johann Tischbein, staying in the Southern Italy city for one month. During his Neapolitan stay, he visited Solfatara, the shallow volcanic crater at Pozzuoli, near Naples, he went up to the top of Mount Vesuvius and he explored the ruins of Ercolano, Pompeii and Paestum, where he was able to admire the Greek architecture.
His next step was visiting Sicily, at the time a dangerous land for foreigners, because of the lack of reception centers and of structured roads. Goethe's Sicilian trip included cities like Palermo, Catania and, at the end, Messina, where he boarded to Naples, risking shipwreck near Capri because of the calm. Once Goethe arrived at Naples, he moved up to Rome, where he stayed for a very long time (10 months), before returning back to Germany.
