There is a precise moment when the journey changes its nature.
It is not the departure from Rome — that is mere logistics, trunks and carriages. Nor is it the passage through the Pontine Marshes, which Goethe finds even better than he had been told. The moment is another. It comes after Capua, when the plain opens out and the air changes. It is a happiness that needs no justification. It simply exists.
And then Goethe meets a man who, on the contrary, wants to found happiness.
Vesuvius kept to our left, violently emitting smoke, and I was filled with quiet delight at seeing this remarkable sight with my own eyes.
25 February 1787
The carriage rolls on between fields of green wheat, already a span high. Rows of poplars hold up the vines, the tendrils swaying from tree to tree like nets. The sky opens. The sun beats down.
“We approached Naples in an atmosphere of the purest brightness.”
And then the sentence worth the whole journey:
“And now we really found ourselves to be in a different country.”
The carriage rolls on between fields of green wheat, already a span high. Rows of poplars hold up the vines, the tendrils swaying from tree to tree like nets. The sky opens. The sun beats down.
Not another city. Another country. Anyone who has made the journey from Rome to Naples, even today, knows what he means. There is a point at which the light shifts register, houses change shape, people’s gestures change speed. Goethe grasps it with a precision that has something physical about it: the flat-roofed houses, the people swarming in the street, the Neapolitan convinced he lives in paradise and holding a dismal idea of the North.
In Rome, at the end of 1786, Goethe had written an enormous sentence:
“I count the day when I entered Rome as my second natal day, a true rebirth”.
It was not rhetoric. In Rome he had truly been transformed. He had completed the definitive version of Iphigenia in Tauris, studied Winckelmann to the point of obsession, learned to look at a statue as one looks at a living face.
“The rebirth, which is remolding me from within, is still in progress”, he had written from Rome.
Rome had been the second birth — slow, disciplined, wholly inward.
But a birth, at some point, needs the world.
In Naples, looking is not enough. One has to understand. And to understand, one has to surrender. Every traveller arrived with his prejudices — Volkmann’s guidebook spoke of thirty to forty thousand idlers in the streets — and Goethe dismantles them one by one. At one point he stops to watch a troop of ragged boys crouching in a circle on a square, their hands turned towards the ground. He does not understand. He racks his brains. Then he discovers that a smith had heated an iron wheel-rim on that very spot, and the stone had kept the warmth. The children stayed there, in silence, warming their hands on that little. It is not misery — it is intelligence. It is not idleness — it is a form of life governed by laws other than those of the North.
“Everything points to the fact that a happy land which abundantly supplies the prime necessities of life also produces people with a happy disposition.”
The most revealing thing, however, is not what Goethe sees. It is what Naples does to him. In Rome he organised his days methodically — drawing in the morning, visits in the afternoon, Winckelmann in the evening. In Naples the programme collapses.
“The place inspires indolence and leisurely living”, he writes, and it is no complaint — it is the astonishment of a man who discovers himself changed. Naples is slowing him down. It is absorbing him into its rhythm.
“Naples itself appears to be happy, free, and lively.”
Three words that belong to Naples alone.
On 26 February — so the Italian Journey has it — Goethe opens his first Neapolitan page with his address.
“Alla Locanda del Sgr. Moriconi al Largo del Castello.”
He writes it with the pleasure of someone savouring a sound: “Letters from all four corners of the world could reach us now at this address, which sounds both cheerful and grand.” A small vanity. I have arrived. Write to me here.
The Largo del Castello was the great open space before the Maschio Angioino, facing the sea. The room is beautiful. Spacious, on the corner, with an iron balcony running round the building and a view over the ever-moving square. The ceiling decorated with a hundred panels of arabesques — Pompeii is near, and it already shows.
Only one thing is missing.
Heating.
February in Naples does what February does — it asks no one’s leave.
“There is no fireplace, no flue to be seen, even though February exercises its rights here too.”
Goethe is unwell. He is cold. They bring him a tripod bearing a flat brazier, full of gently glowing coals under a smooth layer of ash. To get warm one must draw the ash away with the lug of a key — slowly, delicately, unhurriedly. Whoever stirs up the embers for more heat at a stroke puts the whole fire out, and must then pay to have the pan refilled.
A fire that punishes impatience. A perfectly Neapolitan fire.
For the icy floor, a reed mat. For the body, no furs — here they were a rarity. Goethe opens his luggage and takes out a seaman’s cowl that he and Tischbein had brought along as a joke, a curiosity they had never really thought of using. He puts it on. He ties it round his body with a portmanteau cord.
“I had the very odd feeling that I was something halfway between a sailor and a Capuchin.”
When Tischbein returns from visiting Neapolitan friends, he finds the poet muffled in a sailor’s cowl tied with a cord, seated on a reed mat before a brazier that barely gave off heat, in a room with a hundred arabesques and not a single fireplace.
He cannot keep from laughing.
There is something immensely consoling in this scene.
Goethe had waited all his life to reach Naples. His father had been there before him, and had never stopped speaking of it. On 27 February, after seeing the grotto of Posillipo at sunset, he will write a sentence that weighs like a stone:
“it might be said of my father, in reverse, that he could never become completely unhappy, because he returned to Naples again and again in his thoughts.”
For months, from Rome, he had looked southward with the impatience of one who knows the best is yet to come.
And the first page he writes from Naples — the cold, the brazier, the cowl — is no disappointment. It is Goethe sparing himself no ridicule even in the place of his dreams. Great writers know that the sublime and the grotesque always coexist — indeed, they are often one and the same. The journey of a lifetime, the long-awaited place — and there you are in a sailor’s cowl bound with a cord, blowing on a brazier with the lug of a key.
On 27 February he wakes up recovered. And he writes the sentence that already contains everything Naples will be for him — Vesuvius, Pompeii, Pozzuoli, Filangieri, Hamilton, Paestum, the sea:
“Today we feasted.”
In Rome he had been born a second time. In Naples that new life found its rhythm.
The Locanda of Signor Moriconi no longer exists. It was Benedetto Croce, in his Volfango Goethe a Napoli of 1903, who reconstructed its exact location: the houses between Vico delle Campane and Vico Sant’Antonio Abate, the owner Teresa Prencipe, the innkeeper Domenico Moriconi. The entire block was demolished at the end of the nineteenth century in the great urban renewal scheme known as the Risanamento. Whoever wishes today to find the spot where Goethe wrapped himself in that sailor’s cowl must stop at the entrance of the Galleria Umberto I, on the Piazza Municipio side.
No plaque recalls that February of 1787.
Vesuvius is still there. It has not erupted since 1944 — the great cone is silent, without smoke, without lava flows. But it looms exactly as it did then, and whoever arrives from the North for the first time still understands, at first glance, why Goethe wrote “at last”.
Sources
J.W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons, Suhrkamp, New York 1989
Benedetto Croce, Volfango Goethe a Napoli. Aneddoti e ritratti, Napoli, Luigi Pierro, 1903
