Travelogue: Destination Italy

J.W. Goethe

If until the first half of the 18th century the Grand Tour of Italy went only a little further than Naples, in more advanced times the foreign travelers in the Italian peninsula went even further south. Sicily and Magna Graecia – Palermo and Segesta in particular – thus became unmissable destinations for the "grand tourists," who were the first to narrate those beauties in their diaries. Among them, the German thinker and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1787 came to Italy to "look for" the raved Arcadia of Neoclassicism – and believed to have found it in Sicily.