The flight to Italy

This is the authentic day-to-day record of the first eight weeks of freedom experienced by Germany's greatest poet as he headed for the Italy he had longed to see since childhood and there found himself in a wholly new world of warmth and light. Leaving behind the difficulties of a decade in Weimar, the burden of administration, a troubled love affair, and the frustration of not having time to work on his writings, he discovers himself all over again in Italty--as a sensuous being and as an artist. Goethe's fresh, spontaneous notes, sometimes dashed down at crowded tables in primitive Italian inns, unite art and nature; Antiquity and the Renaissance; aesthetics and science; and observations on climate, rocks, plants, and the Italian people in an extemporaneous and telling mixture through which we observe the poet's mature vision of both the natural and human worlds taking form. Never before rendered in English, this rich diary reveals a great European writer at an impressionable turning-point in his life.