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(More customer reviews)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.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters (Oxford World's Classics)
This is the authentic day-to-day record of the first eight weeks of freedom as Germany's greatest poet heads for the Italy he has been yearning to see since childhood and finds himself in a new world of warmth and light. Leaving behind the difficulties of a decade in Weimar, the burden of administration, a difficult love-affair, and the frustration of not having time to work on his literary projects, he discovers himself again as a sensuous being and an artist.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, in an unpremeditated mixture through which the poet's mature vision of the natural and human world can be seen taking shape. Never before translated into English, this diary brings us close to a great European writer at a turning-point of his life.
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