Italian Journey

An authoritative English translation of Goethe’s correspondence and diary entries from his travels in Italy

Containing the letters and diaries that Goethe wrote during his journey to Italy at age thirty-seven, Italian Journey reveals his tremendous range of interests. His writings cover literature, art history and his own struggle to be a painter, various sciences and political events, personal encounters, and the Italian landscape. “In Rome, I first found myself,” Goethe writes, “for the first time I achieved inner harmony.” For Goethe the writer, this temporal and spiritual journey was at the root of his development from Sturm und Drang to classicism, a decisive point in his life and the history of German literature.

The Collected Works of Goethe presents modern translations of a representative portion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s vast body of work. Selected from more than 140 volumes in German, this twelve-volume series remains the standard collection in English and features poetry, drama, fiction, memoir, criticism, and scientific writing.