The Spell of Italy : Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe

A study of the lure of Italy in German culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Examines the degree to which Germany's literary and cultural traditions appropriated a phantasmic Italy. This study shows how Winckelmann's art history and Goethe's Italian journey predisposed later writers to search for an aesthetic ideal in Italy that did not exist, and how their search for this absent ideal resulted in disillusionment.