Goethes Italienische Reise Mit Zeichnungen Und Bildnissen Goethes. [Goethe's Italian Journey With Drawings And Portraits Of Goethe].

"We are all pilgrims who seek Italy", Goethe wrote in a poem two years after his return to Germany from his almost two-year spell in the land he had long dreamed of. For Goethe, Italy was the warm passionate south as opposed to the dank cautious north; the place where the classical past was still alive, although in ruins; a sequence of landscapes, colors, trees, manners, cities, monuments he had so far seen only in his writing.