*Goethe is traveling through Italy, where he's mostly interested in geology, botany, fine art and Latin ruins, although he's often forced to notice that there are Italians all over the place, disfiguring the epic landscapes with their mean daily exigencies.
*It's really rough work to go through one's daily life being all high-souled, noble and grand, which is probably why Goethe scrammed from the lady-like court of Weimar and headed for a two-year vacation in Italy.
He remarks:
"If we contemplate, on the spot, the noble buildings which Palladio has erected, and see how they are disfigured by the mean filthy necessities of the people, how the plans of most of them exceeded the means of those who undertook them, and how little these precious monuments of one lofty mind are adapted to all else around, the thought occurs that it is just the same with everything else; for we receive but little thanks from men, when we would elevate their internal aspirations, give them a great idea of themselves, and make them feel the grandeur of a really noble existence. But when one cajoles them, tells them tales, and helping them on from day to day, makes them worse, then one is just the man they like; and hence it is that modern times take delight in so many absurdities. I do not say this to lower my friends, I only say that they are so, and that people must not be astonished to find everything just as it is."
*There's a missing populist response here, about how one can become rather at ease with the fertile squalor of things-as-they-are while the surviving grandeur of UNESCO World Heritage sites are annoying, oppressive and pretentious. But Goethe's own informal garden house, where he used to stash his mistress and get away from it all, is now itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the tourists are supposed to get all breathless and respectful about Weimar Classicism. Where's Mark Twain when you need him, folks? "Is… is he dead?"
