The Neoclassical Grand Tour of Sicily and Goethe's Italienische Reise

Abstract

The Grand Tour tradition is a very important phenomenon of the eighteenthcentury Europe. During this period, English, French and German aristocrats traveled in Italy for educational purposes. At the same time, in the eighteenth century, Greek ancient culture, art and literature attracted the attention of European intellectuals under the influence of the new aesthetic ideas of the German art historian Winckelmann. For this reason - although the eighteencentury Italian journey generally ended in Naples - some courageous travelers went to Sicily and traveled in this remote and unknown island to discover the remaining ruins of classical Greek civilization. In this period there was a serious increase in travel to Sicily, the center of Greek culture in Italy in ancient times. One of the most important foreign writers who traveled to Sicily and described their travel experience is certainly the German poet and writer Johann W. Goethe. The purpose of this article is to analyse the image of Sicily present in the Italienische Reise by Goethe.