Italian Journey (in the German original: Italienische Reise [itaˈli̯eːnɪʃə ˈʁaɪzə]) is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's report on his travels to Italy from 1786 to 1788 that was published in 1816 & 1817.

At the beginning of September 1786, when Goethe had just turned 37, he "slipped away," in his words, from his duties as Privy Councillor in the Duchy of Weimar, from a long platonic affair with a court lady and from his immense fame as the author of the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and the stormy play Götz von Berlichingen, and he took what became a licensed leave of absence.

By May 1788 he had travelled to Italy via Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass and visited Lake Garda, Verona, Vicenza, Venice, Bologna, Rome and Alban Hills, Naples and Sicily.

The impression is in one sense true, since Goethe was clearly working from journals and letters he composed at the time – and by the end of the book he is openly distinguishing between his old correspondence and what he calls reporting.

[3] The work begins[4] with a famous Latin tag, Et in Arcadia ego, although originally Goethe used the German translation, Auch ich in Arkadien, which alters the meaning.

This Latin phrase is usually imagined as spoken by Death – this is its sense, for example, in W. H. Auden's poem called "Et in Arcadia ego" – suggesting that every paradise is afflicted by mortality.

Cum repeto noctem, Goethe writes in the middle of his own German, as well as citing a whole passage: "When I remember the night..."[5] He is already storing up not only plentiful nostalgia and regret, but also a more complicated treasure: the certainty that he didn't merely imagine the land where others live happily ever after.

[6] "We are all pilgrims who seek Italy," Goethe wrote in a poem two years after his return to Germany from his almost two-year spell in the land he had long dreamed of.

For Goethe, Italy was the warm passionate south as opposed to the dank cautious north; the place where the classical past was still alive, although in ruins; a sequence of landscapes, colours, trees, manners, cities, monuments he had so far seen only in his writing.

[7] While in Italy, Goethe aspired to witness and to breathe the conditions and milieu of a once highly – and in certain respects still – cultured area endowed with many significant works of art.

In Verona, where he enthusiastically commends the harmony and fine proportions of the city amphitheater, he asserts this is the first true piece of Classical art he has witnessed.

It was here that he met several respected German artists, and made friends with Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein and notable Neoclassical painter, Angelica Kauffman.

Goethe looked everywhere for ancient works of art, in museums and private collections, travelled twice to the Royal Palace of Portici where the excavations from Pompeii and Herculaneum were exhibited, he visited the Greek temples in Paestum several times.

Using Palladio and Johann Joachim Winkelmann as touchstones for his artistic growth, Goethe expands his scope of thought in regards to Classical concepts of beauty and the characteristics of good architecture.

He sketched and did watercolours, experimented with modeling a head of Hercules and even shortly toyed with the idea of turning from a writer into a painter when he took painting lessons from Jakob Philipp Hackert in Naples.

[16]I can't begin to tell you of the glory of a night by full moon when we strolled through the streets and squares to the endless promenade of the Chiaia, and then walked up and down the seashore.

For example, he contradicts the German travel author Johann Jacob Volkmann who speaks of "thirty to forty thousand idlers" in Naples, by observing in detail what members of the lower classes deal with on a daily basis.

Rather, passed around by the philosopher Prince Gaetano Filangieri, he allowed himself to be invited to aristocratic palaces and socialized with the British ambassador Sir William Hamilton and his wife Lady Emma.

One result of his trip was that after his return to Weimar he separated his poetic from his political existence by asking the duke to release him from many of his previous duties so that he could do “what no one but I can do, and let other people do the rest".

The Park an der Ilm is filled with a staffage building based on a Roman country house drawn by Goethe, a pompeian bench or the cast of a sacrificial altar from Herculaneum.