On the evening of 2 June, with the Duchess of Giovane, a cultivated young German lady.
Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Plebiscito 1, 80132 Napoli
Juliane von Mudersbach, Duchess Giovane
- Stages: 1
Würzburg 1766 – ?
A German, born in Würzburg, a precocious writer: at fifteen she writes an idyll on the abolition of serfdom in Bohemia, then idylls in the manner of Gessner and books on the education of girls. In Naples, under the protection of Queen Maria Carolina, she marries Duke Nicola Giovane di Girasole. On the evening of 2 June 1787, Goethe's last in Naples, she receives him in her apartment in the Royal Palace; at dusk she throws open the shutters and shows him Vesuvius in eruption, the lava and the full moon rising behind the mountain: "what one can see only once in a lifetime". Croce identified her in 1903.
Main image: AI reconstruction at the age 21, as in 1787, based on the period portrait (SPUN, 2026).
Sources: J. W. Goethe, Italienische Reise; B. Croce, Goethe a Napoli (1903).
