Goethe's "Italian Journey" is a key work of Weimar Classicism - an escape from midlife crisis, a departure into the world, an educational journey into antiquity, and a self-location of the great German poet. It also marks the beginning of a bourgeois tradition: Goethe's account fueled a fascination with Rome and Italy among German and European intellectuals that continues to this day.

Golo Maurer illustrates how Goethe's self-experience in Italy became a model for the generations that followed him. Karl Friedrich Schinkel traveled to Italy in the early 19th century, Richard Wagner in the late 19th century, and the Mann brothers, Walter Benjamin, and Sigmund Freud, who called himself an "Italian pilgrim" - Goethe had set the benchmark for them: "A new life, a new meaning dawns on the thinking and feeling person when he enters this place."

Maurer makes it clear in his book: Goethe's Italian journey was the first German self-discovery trip - and as such, it serves as both an aesthetic topos and an autobiographical challenge for those who came after.