The Casa di Goethe (Via del Corso 18, Rome, in the apartment building at the corner of Via del Corso and Vicolo del Bottino, in the section of Via del Corso between Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Venezia) is the museum established in the rooms where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived during his Italian Journey of 1786-1788. Goethe (1749-1832) arrived in Rome in October 1786, having left Weimar incognito (without informing the Duke who employed him as a court official) in an uncharacteristic act of spontaneous flight from the northern European life that was suffocating him. He stayed in Italy for 22 months, primarily in Rome with excursions to Naples, Sicily, and Venice, and the Italian Journey (Italienische Reise, the account he published 30 years later based on his letters and diaries) is the definitive German text about Italy: the record of a northern European Protestant intellect encountering the Catholic Mediterranean world with the specific combination of rapture, anxiety, and learning that the encounter between northern and southern European sensibilities has always produced.
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Casa di Goethe: The Museum
What the Museum Contains
The Casa di Goethe museum (open Tuesday-Sunday 10am-6pm. Admission approximately €5) occupies two rooms of the apartment that Goethe shared with the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (the painter who made the famous portrait of Goethe reclining on Roman ruins, the most reproduced image of the poet). The collection: original manuscripts and letters from the Roman period. Tischbein's drawings and sketches. Prints, engravings, and watercolors by Goethe himself (he drew obsessively during his Italian Journey, primarily landscapes and architectural sketches). And the specific material culture of the Goethe Rome period, the writing desk, the travel documents, the books. The rooms are small. The museum is intimate. The visit takes 45-60 minutes and rewards a specific degree of prior engagement with the Italian Journey text.
What the Italian Journey Means
The Italienische Reise is the most influential single text about Italy written by a non-Italian: its specific combination of art-historical observation (Goethe's descriptions of the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon, and the archaeological sites of Sicily are the first modern art-critical readings of these monuments by a writer of the first rank), autobiographical honesty (the admission of northern European inadequacy before the southern European sensory world), and the specific Goethe-ism of treating Italy as a school of sight, the specific training of the eye on the Italian world as the fundamental creative and intellectual education available to northern Europeans, established the template for German and eventually anglophone intellectual tourism in Italy that has been followed, consciously or not, ever since. To understand what "going to Italy" means culturally is to understand what Goethe said it meant in 1786-1788.
Q&A: Casa di Goethe Rome
Do I need to have read the Italian Journey before visiting the Casa di Goethe?
Not required, but the visit is significantly richer if you have read at least the Rome sections. The Italian Journey (Penguin Classics edition, translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, the best English translation) is a book that you can open to any page and read for 20 minutes with profit. You don't need to read it linearly from the beginning. The specific preparation for the Rome museum: the sections covering October-November 1786 (the first Roman months), the Carnival of 1787, and the return to Rome for the second stay. The museum sells a copy of the Italian Journey in Italian and German in their small bookshop.
Internal Links
- Roma Settecentesca: La Città di Goethe
- Goethe sul Gianicolo: La Vista dalla Collina
- Il Cimitero Acattolico: Keats, Shelley e il Grand Tour
- Roma Fuori Stagione: La Città del Grand Tour
- Via del Corso: La Strada di Goethe
- Musei Minori Roma: Casa di Goethe e Altri
- Arte a Roma: Il Percorso degli Stranieri Illustri
