Il figlio di Goethe e il naufragio al largo Procida

Abstract

Starting from the lack of odeporistic sources on Procida in the German Literature, the aim of this article is to retrieve August von Goethe’s 1830s travel diary Auf einer Reise nach Süden, which, in recalling his brief landing on the island of Campania, represents a reversal of his father’s travel. The voyage of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s son, in fact, unlike that of his father’s, which was kept at a distance from the sea and possible shipwrecks, takes place as a romantic navigatio vitae that encounters risks and unknowns along sea paths. Italy in August’s eyes is no longer Arcadia, the land of art and ancient nature, travelled by his ancestors, his father Johann Wolfgang and his grandfather Johann Caspar, Italy is a romantic nocturnal, melancholic, bacchic and lethal land. Having reached the far end of the peninsula, heading towards Ischia, August stops off in Procida, amuses himself in a typical ‘osteria di lazzaroni’ and then resumes his voyage through a Bacchic sea that intoxicates in the presence of shipwreck and death, romantic drifts of a Wertherian nihilism that differs from his father’s Humanistic-Renaissance Classicism.