The Flight to Italy

This is the first translation into English of Goethe's diary of his famous Italian journey. Goethe's 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. This diary brings us close to a great European writer at a turning-point of his life and is a fascinating document of eighteenth-century travel, of the classical heritage and its assimilation, and of inter-cultural relations in the late Enlightenment.