Customer Reviews

The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics)

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Those who love Goethe or love Italy or love traveling might have come across The Italian Journey, Goethe's late-in-life rendering of his experience "fleeing" Weimar and hopeless love to fulfill a lifelong dream of being in Italy. I can't say staying in Italy or visiting Italy or studying Italy because Goethe's quest was so much more profound and fundamental; in Italy Goethe hoped to BE. This diary and these letters, however, are Goethe's immediate impressions, un-editted and not reconsidered. These are his immediate considerations and his emotions expressed in the diary he wrote for Frau von Stein, the woman he loved more or less hopelessly for several years. I love both books, but this one, unlike Italian Journey, is not neatly refined and carved and considered from a mature viewpoint; this is full of the urgency and passion and longing that propelled Goethe across the Brenner and up the slopes of Vesuvius. It's just GREAT.

Goethe's Italian journey came after ten hard years administering and working at Weimar. In these years his literary output contracted. The trip to Italy was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a dream inspired in part by his own father's earlier journey and love of Italy. In Italy Goethe found yet another side of his multifaceted self . He opened to the world and the light and to sensuous reality. His connection with Nature is a fundamental theme of his poetry and in Italy he found a Nature which seemed imbued with organic form and Art , and an Art imbued with Nature. In a sense leaving home enabled him to come home to a central side of himself.

Goethe was a writer- scientist- artist whose central theme was his own inner development. This development took a dramatic turn for the good, and these journals of his Italian trip are a central part of ' the great confession' which was his work.