Goethe's journey to the Italian peninsula and Sicily from 1786 to 1788 is of great significance in his aesthetic and philosophical development.

His father had made a similar journey during his own youth, and his example was a major motivating factor for Goethe to make the trip.

More importantly, however, the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann has provoked a general renewed interest in the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome.

Thus Goethe's journey has something of the nature of a pilgrimage to it.

During the course of his trip Goethe meets and befriended the artists Angelica Kauffman and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, as well as encountering such notable characters as Lady Hamilton and Alessandro Cagliostro.

He also journeys to Sicily during this time, and writes intriguingly that "To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is to not have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything."

While in Southern Italy and Sicily, Goethe encounters, for the first time, genuine Greek (as opposed to Roman) architecture, and is quite startled by its relative simplicity.

Winckelmann had not recognized the distinctness of the two styles.

Goethe's diaries of this period form the basis of the non-fiction Italian Journey.

Italian Journey only covers the first year of Goethe's visit.

The remaining year is largely undocumented, aside from the fact that he spent much of it in Venice. This "gap in the record" has been the source of much speculation over the years.

In the decades which immediately follow  its publication in 1816, Italian Journey will inspire countless German youths to follow Goethe's example.

This is pictured, somewhat satirically, in George Eliot's Middlemarch.