Goethe's Italienische Reise: “You could educate yourself if you were a man and had the money"

For Goethe, Italy was an educational journey. Over 200 years ago, the poet liked to romanticise the “land where lemons blossom”. But the topos of Italy changed over the years in literature, especially after the Second World War. Francesca Teltscher Taylor from Monash University in Melbourne critically questioned the tradition of the educational trip to Italy in her doctoral thesis.

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