A sumptuous journey through Goethe's Italy

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Patricia Andrew applauds 'the indulgent sumptuousness, and the wonderfully nostalgic atmosphere' of this large-scale publication

Grand Tour: A Photographic Journey Through Goethe’s Italy. Essay by Andrea Amerio

Sometimes a book arrives which isn’t quite what I was expecting. This publication came as a huge surprise, one reason being its size, which is, well, huge (49 x 34.2 x 3 cms to be exact). Not so much a coffee-table book as a coffee table.

Also, its content was rather unexpected. I’d ordered it expecting to find essays on Goethe and his famous Grand Tour of Italy in the late-18th century, illustrated with a selection of photographs. In fact the essay by Andrea Amerio, a mere two pages in length, is just a short introduction describing the phenomenon of the Grand Tour in Goethe’s day. The rest of the book comprises excerpts from Goethe’s own descriptions of places from his celebrated Italian Journey, together with a series of ‘gelatin silver prints, some of which are hand-colored’.  It’s rather an odd thing to be reading the words of an 18th-century writer while looking at photographs from around a hundred years later, without any commentary from the present day. It rather begs the question of why the photographic images should be from the 19th century, rather than from the 20th or 21st centuries. But by the time I’d been through the book, I could see that it’s an interesting attempt to capture as much as possible of the ‘old Italy’ before the days of modern tourism, seen by the ‘reality’ of photography rather than by any artist’s interpretations.

And having perhaps sounded a bit grumbly about the oddities of the publication, I must applaud its indulgent sumptuousness, and the wonderfully nostalgic atmosphere it creates. For someone like me who has lived and worked in Italy, it provides yet more wonderful glimpses of the ever-fascinating history of the country, land and townscape.

Its photographs take us from Lake Garda, Verona and Padua in the north, via Venice and Florence, to Rome and south to Naples, and the islands of Capri and Sicily. Some of the cities appear deserted of people, their windows shuttered, for these early photographers were often working early in the morning before residents could emerge to blur the images with their movement.

Not all the excerpts from Goethe’s writing quite match what the cameras recorded. On Capri, women and children pose at the bottom of the great rock-cut cliff staircase, the Scala Fenicia, with an air of bemusement and even irritation. Goethe was ‘enraptured’ by Capri and described the island in magical terms, while these people display evidence of very un-magical poverty, and a hard life.      

Goethe’s writing on Italy may be familiar to me, but these images are new. The identities of many of the photographers, working from around 1870 to 1900, are unknown. The very large format of the book enables us to see great detail in the photographs (some shown as double-page spreads), though in some cases this results in a lack of clarity: varying sizes on the pages would have done the images more justice.  Also, they bear no captions; these are supplied at the end of the book, alongside smaller reproductions of each image.

There is little to learn here, and the brief extracts of Goethe’s writing are unlikely to give the reader any real understanding of his visit. But the conspicuous splendour of the book, with its text in both English and German, should make a wonderfully opulent gift for anyone who loves Italy.

Grand Tour: A Photographic Journey Through Goethe’s Italy, essay by Andrea Amerio, published by Hatje Cantz, 2013.  144 pp.  illustrated in mono and colour. ISBN 978-3-7757-3618-3