Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

On 3 September he stole out at 3 in the morning so that his friends at the spa could not detain him, and set off alone in a post-chaise with only a portmanteau and a knapsack.

He arrived about noon, noticed that the town lay on the same latitude as his native Frankfurt, and ate his midday meal under a clear sky.

Immediately on arrival he went to the Jesuit college, where the pupils were giving their annual play, and saw the end of the opera and the beginning of the tragedy.

In a stay of about twelve hours he was delighted by Rubens's sketches for the Luxembourg gallery and saw a model of Trajan's Column made of lapis lazuli.

Having left the inn on the Brenner by moonlight, he arrived about 8 in the evening of 10 September after some fifty hours of constant travel.

He made a detour to the lake instead of going straight to Verona; on the way down he saw his first olive tree in fruit, and he set a table in the inn's courtyard to sketch the view of the lake.

On 13 September a change of wind forced his boat into the harbour, and he made a drawing of the castle by the water.

He recorded the amphitheatre as the first important monument of antiquity he had seen, and walked round the edge of it at the top.

He described Palladio's Teatro Olimpico as a theatre of the ancients realised on a small scale, and visited the Rotonda on a rise about half a league from the town.

Walking among unfamiliar plants in the botanic garden, he became more convinced of the idea that all plant forms might be developed from a single form.

He arrived on 28 September by the public boat down the Brenta from Padua; on 5 October he visited the Arsenal and went on board an eighty-four-gun ship.

He saw Ariosto's monument, and wrote that the woodshed shown to visitors as Tasso's prison was certainly not where Tasso had been kept.

Hurried through palaces and churches by a guide, he wrote first of all about seeing Raphael's Saint Cecilia with his own eyes.

In his hurry to reach Rome he ran quickly over the city, the cathedral and the baptistery, and left the Boboli Gardens as fast as he had entered them.

He walked up to the town to see the Augustan temple of Minerva he knew from Palladio, leaving the churches where Saint Francis lies on his left, with aversion.

He entered by the Porta del Popolo on 29 October, stayed first at the Albergo dell'Orso, and soon moved into the painter Tischbein's lodgings on the Via del Corso.

He arrived with Tischbein on 25 February; Vesuvius was smoking on their left all the way, and he was quietly glad to see it at last with his own eyes.

On a cloudy day he rode by carriage to Resina and by mule beyond, then crossed the lava of 1771 on foot to the old crater; he climbed the mountain three times during his stay.

He went with Tischbein and was struck by the narrow, straight streets and small windowless houses, writing that even the public buildings looked like models or dolls' houses.

He stayed with the painter Hackert in the old castle, found the new palace kingly but gloomy, and saw the gardens fed by an aqueduct that brings down a whole river from the mountains.

He went with Kniep, the painter he had just engaged to draw for him, who sketched busily at the temples and on the road there and back.

His ship, at sea from Naples since 29 March, got into harbour on the afternoon of 2 April. He spent many hours in the public gardens by the roadstead and wondered there whether he might find the primordial plant among them.

Examining the steps and the unlevelled ground around them, he concluded that the temple had never been finished.

He stayed from 23 to 27 April and went round the ruins of the Greek temples.

In the museum of Prince Biscari's palace he saw ancient marbles and bronzes, and was especially taken with a torso of Jupiter.

Told that snow made the summit unreachable, on 5 May he rode by mule to Monte Rosso to view Etna and the old lava that had once poured from there down onto the city.

Sitting where the uppermost spectators once sat in the ancient theatre, he wrote that no audience ever had such a view before it; Kniep spent the next day sketching there.

He rode for a quarter of an hour past ruin after ruin to reach the inn, and wrote that the survivors of the earthquake had lived for three years in a town of planks on the meadows north of the city.

Soon after returning to Rome he went out with Hackert to draw the waterfalls and ruins, and wrote that he was worn out from walking and sketching in the heat.

Staying with Councillor Reiffenstein, he drew and painted from morning until night, and in the evenings visited the villas by moonlight to sketch them.

On 12 October he wrote from here to Herder, thanking him for his Ideas (Ideen), which had just reached him.

He left Rome in April 1788 and was back on 18 June; a few weeks later, on 12 July, he met Christiane Vulpius, who later became his wife.