The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters

’At three in the morning I crept out of Carlsbad, they wouldn’t have let me go if I hadn’t. I wasn’t going to be stopped, for it was time.’

This is the authentic day-to-day record never before translated, of the first eight weeks of freedom as Germany’s greatest poet heads for the Italy he has been yearning to see since childhood. Leaving behind the growing frustrations of administrative work, a difficult love-affair, and lack of time to write, he discovers himself again as a sensuous being and an artist. His fresh and spontaneous notes, sometimes dashed down at crowded tables in primitive Italian inns, bring together art and nature, Antiquity and the Renaissance, aesthetics and science, observations of climate, rocks, plants, and the Italian people, in an unpremeditated mixture through which the poet’s mature vision of the natural and human world can be seen taking shape. Goethe’s Italian diary brings us close to a great European writer at a turning-point in his life.

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

T. J. Reed is Taylor Professor emeritus of the German language and literature at Oxford University.