Johann

In early June 1787, on a day bright and summer warm, Goethe passes through the Porta del Popolo into Rome. This time couldn’t be more different to the last. His mind isn’t on the capital of the world, the eternal city, the city most sacred.

He is thinking of Vesuvius. And the lava stream that’s issued forth from the summit, coursing its way to the sea.

An incommensurable tragedy to miss this experience! But the volcano erupted after he’d said his farewells in Naples, and though he’d stayed on a day or two, hoping to witness this rare geological marvel, the lava stream was slowing—it might take weeks to touch water, he was told.

So he departed, and here he is, one hundred and forty miles away from the volcano, en route to 18 Via del Corso.

 

Schütz and Bury are overjoyed to see him. They hover around, wishing to know all about his adventures in Naples, down to Sicily, and back again. They want to see his sketches, his watercolors. They want to know if the sea looks different in the south, if the fruit are sweeter, the women more beautiful, more compliant, the wine stronger, the towns more ancient, and the sunsets more maddeningly glorious.

Goethe laughs. “The answer to all of this is yes. Except the women—I wouldn’t know.”

“The second pillow remains ever cursed, then?”

Alas, he sighs, yes.

Just then, Tischbein enters the room, and even though their reunion is amiable enough, there’s a distinct coolness in their exchange. “How was Sicily?” he asks politely.

“Good.”

“Good?” interjects Schütz. “You wrote to us saying it’s a dream . . . that one hasn’t seen Italy without seeing Sicily . . .”

Goethe begs their forgiveness; he is weary. He’ll retire now and be with them later. Schütz and Bury steal a quick glance. They know little of what transpired between the two friends in Naples, but their guess is that whatever it was came in the way of Tischbein accompanying Goethe farther south. He returned from Naples while Goethe was in Sicily. For now, they do not speak of it and graciously excuse Goethe, saying of course he must rest.

 

This time, unlike the last, it is a strange settling-in, because as the plan stands, Goethe is meant to leave Rome in time to be in Germany by early autumn, before the Alps become impassable for the winter. Should he bother to unpack?

He remembers thinking, a month earlier, while waiting for the ship back to Naples in Messina, the last city he visited in Sicily, that this was it. There was no turning away from it now. He had begun his journey back north, back to Weimar. When he arrived in Naples, this felt even more real. Count Fries, a Viennese visitor, handed him mail he’d collected for him from Rome. Several letters from Fritz Stein, two from Charlotte, and three from the duke. Weimar, which had seemed so far away during his two months in the deep south, was now pressing upon his attention again. In his letters back home, he had to sound definite about his achievements—this was a tour of the homeland of classical culture on which I have hastened from peak to peak—even though his mind was still a whirl from all he’d seen on the island. Journeys don’t end when you disembark from the boat or step out of the carriage, he had wanted to write. It takes time to comprehend their purpose, and this is ruined when it is drawn into a narrative too quickly, too soon. I have seen much, and that is all I have to say, he began in one letter, then crumpled it up and started another.

More important, he’d needed to be clear about his intentions. So he outlined in detail his plans to be in Germany in early autumn. The greatest care he took, though, was over his reply to the duke, working on the letter for several days before he finally gathered the courage to request a complete revision of his official commitments as a civil servant and to be relieved of all administrative work in Weimar. It wasn’t easy, but perhaps because he’d embarked on this adventure, ridden a mule through mountain rain, scaled Vesuvius three times and looked into the depths of a volcano, or because the bottle of Nero d’Avola he was drinking was a particularly strong vintage—he signed, sealed, and dispatched the letter.

He hoped to have a reply waiting for him in Rome.

 

There is no reply awaiting him in Rome. Only days that grow ever warmer.

In the long afternoons, his living quarters are stifling, despite closing the shutters to keep the sunlight out. He despairs, but sets out to complete at least the botanical work with which he’s tasked himself. From the market square, he buys terra-cotta pots, fills them with soil and sand, and plants the prickly pear cactus seeds he brought from Sicily—after lightly scratching the seed coat and soaking them in water. Hopefully, in this heat, they will germinate before he sets off north. He’s telling the others how that’s all his room is good for at the moment, as a tropical hothouse, when Tischbein makes a surprising offer.

“You can have my studio,” he says.

The party is at Caffè Greco, taking refuge from the summer, drinking locally brewed German beer, which is surprisingly good. They’re joined by their artist friend Hackert, here from Naples to help move the renowned Farnese art collection back to the Neapolitan royal family.

“And where will you be?” everyone asks Tischbein.

“I’ll be leaving for Naples.”

There are cries of confusion around the table, though Goethe is silent.

“When?” they ask in chorus.

“Early July.”

“So it worked out,” says Goethe. “Congratulations.”

Tischbein thanks him and then turns to the others. “You are now looking at the new director of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli.”

The uproar at this is even more boisterous, and many congratulatory rounds of beer are consumed.

Afterward, Goethe is asked what he thought of the city at the foot of Vesuvius.

He answers quietly. “Rome is where you study. Naples is where you live.” When he first arrived in Naples, he says, he thought that here was where one casts aside all memories, even of Rome. As compared with the free, open situation of Naples, the capital of the world, on the Tiber flats, was like a wretchedly placed monastery.

Most of the party protests. “Surely not, sir!”

“You asked.” He shrugs. “I’m being honest.”

 

Later, when they leave, Goethe finds that Moritz has fallen in step with him. His young friend has stuck close to his side ever since he has returned. On his suggestion, they take a short walk, although daylight is failing and Rome’s streets are dangerously unlit.

“Did you really prefer Naples to Rome?”

“If I said I did, it would make me the freest, most fun-loving, pleasure-seeking German I’ve known. To live in Naples is to have no thought for tomorrow, it is to be perfectly content in the here and now, to be comfortable with happy frivolity.”

“You couldn’t bear it, could you?”

“By the end, no.”

They maneuver their way around a pile of bricks and what looks suspiciously like horse dung.

“Did Tischbein pushing for the Accademia job have anything to do with it?”

“With what?”

“The two of you falling out.”

“Somewhat.”

Moritz doesn’t press him further, but Goethe continues. “I think we found ourselves at odds with our separate agendas. He with official work, and me with my exploration. It’s a waste of time to scale the heights of Vesuvius when attending aristocratic lunch parties would be rather more fruitful to furthering your career.”

“I would have climbed Vesuvius with you.”

Goethe smiles. “I know.”

He doesn’t mention the argument that had broken out between them, how it spiraled out of control and ended with Tischbein saying unspeakable things. Compounded perhaps by the frustrations of traveling together, they were fired, all the accusatory arrows—Tischbein was foolhardy, Goethe too cautious; Tischbein was tardy, Goethe gave constant counsel. He doesn’t remember how they’d come to him and relationships, and Charlotte, but they had. He was called a coward, involved with her only because it helped him avoid the fixity of marriage. “For you only the charm of endlessly becoming,” Tischbein had spat, “whatever that means!” And along with this, the illusion that he has freedom. By this time, Goethe had been too livid to speak.

Later, Tischbein had approached him, abashed and profusely apologetic, and Goethe had said it was quite all right—but something remained unhealed between them.

It takes a moment for him now to realize that Moritz has asked him a question. He has asked what his most treasured experience has been, that he’s carried with him from the south. Goethe is silent a long while, and Moritz expects him to protest, saying that there are far too many and he cannot choose, but he doesn’t. He finally replies: “Light.”

On one of his last evenings in Naples, he says, he left the theater by the harbor and walked out along the Molo in the warm air. “At a single glance, I saw the full moon, the moonlight edging the clouds, the moonlight in the sea and on the edges of the nearest waves, the lamps of the lighthouse, the fires of Vesuvius, its reflection in the water, and the lights on the ships.” Southern Italy became then what he thinks it will always remain to him—a memory of light.

 

To get away from the heat, his stuffy room, and Tischbein, Goethe accepts an invitation from Hackert to spend a fortnight sketching at Tivoli and in the Alban Hills, about nineteen miles from Rome.

He had first met Hackert while in Naples, in the artist’s comfortable living quarters in the royal palace at Caserta, where he instructed the princesses in painting. Goethe had shown him some of his work, and been the recipient of Hackert’s blunt judgment: “You’ve got talent, but you’re incompetent.” His advice? Study for eighteen months if he wanted to produce something that would give pleasure to himself and to others. From then on, Goethe’s painterly ambitions had quietly dwindled, relegating art to a “pastime.”

But he is more than happy to go sketching with Hackert now in a place so picturesque. They wander amidst woods and waterfalls and classical ruins, with Hackert bestowing upon Goethe the attentions of an instructor. There are, he declares, only three forms of leaf that the painter needs to know: the chestnut, the poplar, and the oak, and all other foliage could be constructed from these elements.

“Oh, I’ve been thinking about . . . how should I say it? . . . templates, too.”

“In painting?”

“No, in botany.”

Hackert blinks, his face blank as a brick wall.

Goethe wonders for a moment whether he ought to take the trouble to share with him some of the botanical ideas he’s been harboring over the last few months, shaped by his travels south, and decides against it. Something tells him Hackert might not be a sympathetic audience.

“Never mind,” he says. “Show me how to draw foliage.”

 

When he returns to Rome, later in June, a letter awaits him from the duke.

He rushes out of his room after reading it. “I can stay,” he announces, except there’s no one in the anteroom apart from Tischbein, who looks up inquiringly from his book. Goethe hesitates. “I just received a letter from the duke. He’s in Prussia, taking up the rank of major general in the army, and he doesn’t see the need for my return until he himself is back in Weimar early next year.”

“That’s wonderful. And as I said, you’re welcome to take my room.”

Goethe nods and makes to leave, but he has more to share—in fact, this bit of news is even more exciting than the first. He stops at the door.

“What is it?” asks Tischbein.

In his previous correspondence with the duke he’d requested a revision of his official administrative commitments in Weimar. To this, the letter indicates, his employer is not entirely averse. The duke is happy to consider retaining him even in the rather indefinite role being proposed.

“Finally,” says Tischbein, “you can be there as an artist.”

Despite all that has unfolded, unraveled, between them in Naples, Goethe must admit, even if grudgingly, that Tischbein, his first host in Italy, his earliest friend in Rome, would understand best why this was so important to him.

 

With this unexpected windfall of time stretching before him, Goethe settles more comfortably into life in the city.

He decides to start reworking, and hopefully finish, Egmont, a play he’d abandoned five years ago. By early July, he is able to move into Tischbein’s vacated studio, larger and cooler than his own room. Here he shuts himself up, sleeps long hours, emerging at dawn to walk through Piazza del Popolo to the fountain of Acqua Acetos, where he takes the mineral waters in Bernini’s pump rooms. By eight, he returns to the studio, works on his play, inspects the seeds in the pots installed on the window ledge.

This is his first summer, he feels, never having known temperatures like these before in his life. Something is quickened, yes, but something is quietened also. It is a muted time, as though a veil has fallen on the world. Perhaps because of this, he retreats into a strange despondency.

I keep to myself as much as possible, he writes to Charlotte. The artists wish to take me along with them wherever they go—which is kind and generous of them—but I usually decline and keep to my solitude. He writes to her faithfully still, filling her in on all the details of his life, but something feels irrevocably changed since he burned her letters. Something else was relinquished to the fire. He’d been convinced that she’d understand, that eventually she’d forgive him his truancy—and why shouldn’t she? Did he not have every right in the world to do what he did?—but all her letters are now briefer, less affectionate, studded consistently with the formal “Sei.” Only briefly does she break once to say du hast mich allein gelassen. You left me alone.

Yes, he did, he thinks, bristling defensively, and there was no other way.

Occasionally, he visits Angelica; she, too, has begun a portrait of him, although it is composed in close up, and in a more formal style than the one Tischbein painted of him in the Campagna. On some evenings, he bathes in the Tiber, not freely—some would say wildly—as he did in the Ilm, but by using a respectable, well-appointed bathing machine out in the water. Sometimes he goes out to watch a comic opera, or simply for a cool walk, to the Colosseum at twilight, or to the top of Trajan’s Column to watch the sun setting over the city . . .

 

He meets Moritz for some hours almost every day—and even though they haven’t been able to resume their botanical excursions because of the heat, Goethe is keen to share with him details of the flora he’d seen on his southern travels.

When he and Tischbein headed out of Rome, almost immediately the vegetation was unfamiliar, he reports—prickly pears pushing their large fleshy leaves amid the gray green of dwarf myrtles, the yellowish green of the pomegranate, and the pale silvery green of the olive. In the meadows, the narcissus and the Adonis were in flower. As they traveled farther, they were greeted by orange trees hanging over walls flanking the road, loaded with so much fruit “I could scarcely believe my eyes!” In Sicily, he was welcomed with fresh green mulberry trees, evergreen oleanders, and hedges of citron. In the open gardens, large beds of ranunculus and anemones bloomed. The roads were lined with wild bushes and tangled shrubs brilliant with flowers: the lentisk, a mass of yellow blossoms with not a single green leaf to be seen, the white thorn, cluster on cluster; the aloes rising high, promising to flower; rich tapestries of amaranthine clover and little roses; hyacinths with unopened bells; asphodels and other wild flowers. Flowering thistles swarmed with countless butterflies; wild fennel stood high, dry and withered, of last year’s growth, but still so rich that one might almost take it to be an old nursery ground.

Goethe pauses to take a breath, and then laughs. “Pardon me, I get carried away.”

“Please,” says Moritz. “There is nothing to forgive.”

This evening, they have walked to the top of Janiculum Hill, and are standing beside the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, before its three arches. From under the middle arch, the water falls into a pool so blue that it looks as though it is pouring into the sky. They turn, and before them lies the city, glowing in the evening sun. On the distant hill opposite, across the river, stands the elegant white form of Villa Medici.

“It sounds wonderful,” says Moritz, “a world undreamt of by us in our more northerly homelands . . .”

“It’s true, Sicily is extraordinary to the eyes . . .”

“What I’m curious about is whether all of this revealed something?”

Goethe nods. “Many things I think . . . Isn’t that why we embark on journeys? Not only to see new things but to see things in new ways.” He is about to continue when a shout is raised from behind them. “Look who it is! The Baron who lives opposite the Rondanini Palace.” Hackert and Reiffenstein, also out to take the evening air, are striding up to join them. Their presence brings to a close any further botanical talk, for now a fervent discussion breaks out instead over where to wine and dine this evening.

 

Soon it also becomes an unspoken understanding that Goethe is to lunch with Angelica every Sunday. In the morning, her carriage draws up for him outside 18 Via del Corso, and they drive to one gallery then another, to look at paintings.

In her company, Goethe meets Jacob More, “More of Rome,” a Scottish landscape painter who visited the city in 1773 and never left.

“I can paint,” he tells them, “nowhere else.”

“Is that true?” asks Angelica.

“Well, the wine here is so much better.”

One Sunday, they visit the Barberini Palace, with its rows of windows and graceful arches. He usually finds it a pleasure to accompany her, with her sharp, trained eye, and her immense knowledge, but that afternoon is scorching and the rooms are warm and airless. As they move from one painting to another, he falls slowly silent.

“Are you well?” she asks. He’s mopping his forehead and leaning against the wall.

“I’m afraid this northerner is suffering from the summer a little.”

“Oh, it must unbearable for you, Johann . . . you must get out, to the country.”

He informs her he has an invitation from Reiffenstein to be in Frascati in September.

“And the month after, we’ll be at Castel Gandolfo,” she adds. “You simply must join us.”

Feeling more cheerful at the prospect of getting away, he turns to the painting he had been in no mood to admire a moment ago. Raphael’s portrait of his mistress, “La Fornarina.” Angelica guides his eye over the details of the night landscape, the way the woman is carried forward to the viewer by the contrast between light and dark.

Goethe exclaims, in delight, “It is incredible how much you know!”

She waves him off, smiling. “I’ve been painting since I was ten; if I didn’t, it would be embarrassing, shameful, even.” Her first accomplished self-portrait was completed when she was thirteen, at the same time she was painting portraits of bishops and nobles.

“And yet, alas, you have failed with mine, Angelica.”

“Are you saying I have not managed to pull it off, the portrait of you?”

“Exactly. He bears no resemblance to me whatsoever. He’s far too handsome.”

“Then, my dear Johann, we would have fooled the world forever.”

 

Now that Tischbein has left, and is firmly ensconced in Naples, Bury and Schütz appoint themselves custodians of Goethe’s social life.

They have many friends in the German community in Rome, musicians, composers, painters, singers, and there is no dearth of events they wish him to attend. They manage, finally, to get him to come to a dance being held in the garden behind their house.

“This is the only reason I’m agreeing,” says Goethe. “So that if I faint while waltzing like a fool in this heat, you can carry me up to my room with no trouble.”

It’s a young, carefree gathering. A quartet plays lively tunes in a corner, the wine flows freely, and a generous number of ladies are in attendance, willing to dance. Goethe whirls around with one and then another, and is pleasantly surprised: he’s having a jolly time. The women tease and flirt, saying that the northerner needs to thaw, that they must show him an unforgettable time. One in particular, Catarina, is tipsily audacious. They dance three dances in a row, and at the end she leans closely over, and whispers into his ear—Upstairs? But he doesn’t continue this flirtation, or any of the others. Ten years ago something might have happened but that kind of fire, he thinks, is now cold.

Later, quietly, before the festivities come to an end, he slips away. Instead of heading back to the house, he goes for a short walk. It is one of those silver-stained nights. Sometimes, when there’s a cool breeze, groups of people gather in the streets playing music, singing until the small hours. Tonight, he can hear a duet, somewhere in the distance, beautiful as anything one hears at the opera or in a concert. Usually, this lifts him up, but at the moment he’s filled with sadness, certain he’s doomed always to be on his own and on the outside of things.

Perhaps Tischbein was right, he begins to think, that he is not brave enough to make a commitment—and then he stops himself. No, that way leads to lies, a madman’s delusional ramblings, to insanity.

*  *  *

August, he discovers, is the warmest month, and so he stays quietly home all day.

The hours stretch before him longer than ever. He works and occasionally he takes a break to examine the prickly pear. All this while he’d anxiously waited for the seeds to germinate, sometimes checking the pots three times a day. Had he covered them too thickly with soil? Cactus seeds have small amounts of stored energy, and are unable to break through to the surface if planted too deep. For weeks the soil remained undisturbed, but in mid-July, tender tips of green broke through, and swelled into small, fleshy shoots. He’d sat there chuckling to himself. Who would think a plant with such an ungainly form would begin life with such elegance?

Now he’s chosen to sketch the one that’s most robust—and he draws it every day; watching the cactus grow and take shape. First, no more than a globule, like a fingernail, with an indentation on the top that becomes more pronounced as it enlarges, and pushes up two succulent leaves, the twinned cotyledons that lengthen bladelike and tapering, edged all around by a reddish green. At the center, a dome dotted with glochidia, hairlike spines, begins to appear, fine and soft and white. It is fascinating; a phenomenon he hasn’t had a chance to observe previously. Slowly the dome elongates, and the surface between the glochidia grows. He can see now that they are arranged in clusters, usually of five.

How marvelous!

There is nothing more enlivening than being entangled in this manner with another living being. It never ceases to surprise him, that however jaded he might be—of life, of court, of poetry, even—the presence of a plant, in the woods, on a windowsill, renews him endlessly.

It is something he had also felt with the little potted gentian in his study in Weimar—a gift from Charlotte, he might add—how his thinking becomes enlivened by a plant’s living presence, as it flows in wholeness from seed to leaf to flower and back to seed.

With the gentian, he’d also began to practice seeing. Not the usual hasty cast-a-glance-this-way-and-that of the analytically inclined eye, but a seeing that called for a long, careful looking.

He is still trying to work out what exactly it entails, but he strongly suspects that this mode of perception will draw on instinct, imagination, inspiration, what he holds close and feels are insufficiently employed—often dismissed—within the scientific practices emerging today. At first, for certain, a preparation—a “first meeting” with the phenomenon. The most useful characteristic at this stage being a childlike receptivity, an openness, a willingness to wonder. “Simply, what piques your curiosity?” he’d explained to Moritz. “Is it not obvious that we are drawn to certain phenomena on account of who we are? Why is this rarely, if ever, acknowledged?”

Then, perhaps a need to stand back and approach the subject with nothing to aid us but our ordinary senses. To attempt to observe with as little judgment and evaluation as possible. “Hold back your theories! Let the phenomena speak for themselves!”

For this, he’s found drawing to be a useful tool—where one’s attention may be closely brought to previously unnoticed details or patterns. See a particular prickly pear, rather than employ a seeing-prickly-pear mode of perception.

“What else can we do?” Moritz had urged. “To help us to see anew?”

“I recommend throwing away the names of things,” Goethe declared. This would allow for new descriptions outside of learned classifications. “If I could, Moritz, I would place a restriction on the use of nomenclature—at least to begin with. Find other words to describe the part you’re looking at . . . New words give us new eyes . . . words that work not to fix but to encourage exploration.”

It was also important to use all your senses. Smell the plants. Touch them! Use the nonvisual to engage with the phenomenon.

“And then?” his young friend enquired.

“I’m not entirely sure yet.”

“No?”

Goethe shakes his head. “But I have found it useful to imagine the observed phenomenon in my mind.” At this point, he mainly employs a retreat into silence, because to verbalize, he’d begun to feel, was to taint, even to distract from a sensory experience before one had come to understand it. For months now, he’s been trying to reinvest attention in the sensory experience. No more thinking, he vowed. Plunge instead into seeing. For hours he would do this—produce imaginatively, for instance, a leaf that filled a developmental gap between those that were evident in a plant. This helped shed light on the process of growth as opposed to recording only the plant’s form. He experienced the leaf sequence as if he were living in the changing forms of the leaf rather than seeing the individual static representation. This helped him attune himself to seeing movement and to seeing things in transition.

As he’d told Moritz, “I am trying to see all at once.” To see all at once is the only way to truly understand something that is alive.

There are more stages to work through, he is certain, but for now he turns back to the prickly pear, sitting young and green and gleaming before him—filled with potential. Of course, there’s no hope of planting and growing these in the north—unless he owned a hothouse. He toys with the idea of requesting one of the duke, and then decides against it. He’s just been relieved of all administrative duties and still draws a salary; he ought not to push his luck.

 

When Goethe tires of being in the studio, he heads outside—it does not rain at all these days, the sky is always cloudless, and at noon the heat ferocious. My greatest consolation during this heat wave, he writes to his friends in Weimar, is my conviction that you, too, must be having a fine summer in Germany.

He escapes the worst of it by seeking out spots in the city where he can work. Some palazzo or the other, with high ceilings and fortuitous cross-ventilation. Ideal, though, is the Sistine Chapel, which stays dimly lit and cool. A generous tip to the custodian allows him in through the back door next to the altar, and he settles down wherever he likes. Sometimes he smuggles in bread and cheese, some fruit, and after a meal snatches a nap on the papal throne.

Despite the season’s slowness, Egmont is almost done—he has completed the fourth act, and soon he hopes to announce that he has finished the play. It is a miracle, this effusive productivity. What is it about Italy that calls forth this uninterrupted creative flow?

Perhaps because not a day goes by that doesn’t add to his knowledge—of art and improving his skill—here, if one is willing and receptive, one can easily fill oneself to the brim like an open bottle plunged under water. That must be it. To learn is to create; to create, learn. Always to walk both paths, and not just one.

How much more at ease he feels, how little he can recognize the weary person he was a year ago. It is only here, in this plenitude, that he has really come to know himself—and the city. To acquire an intimate knowledge of Rome, its atmosphere, and to feel natural and at home, one must do what he has been able to—live here and walk about the city day after day. He feels he’ll never tire of it, that he could easily do this all his life.

The greatest of his delights still remain his daily walks with Moritz.

The young writer tells him what he has thought for himself during the day, and what he has read in other authors—“You are filling up gaps in my knowledge, Moritz!” As they walk, they look at buildings, landscapes, monuments, and when they come home in the evening and sit chatting and joking, Goethe draws up some view or the other that struck him particularly, to share with friends or keep as a memento.

This evening, a pleasant tramontana is blowing from the north, and the air is perfectly fresh. Moritz is telling him about his novel—that he is still working on it, but it will, by his own admission, take a while. The writing, over the summer, has slowed. In fact, the only progress he’s made of late is to come up with a title.

“Well, more than I did in ten years at Weimar,” says Goethe. “What is it, if I may ask?”

“I thought . . . Anton Reiser.”

They are sitting by the lake at Villa Borghese. Across from them, on a small island, a temple to Asclepius is almost reaching completion.

“It’s the name of the character,” Moritz goes on to explain, “but it also hints at the theme. Anton from Saint Anthony the hermit and Reiser being a wanderer.”

“I like it.”

“Yes?”

Goethe nods. “It’s clever . . . simple yet hinting at something deeper.”

They speak more about the novel, and Moritz’s other new idea—to study the works of antiquity with the intention of writing something unstuffy and accessible for the young, average reader, but around them, rapidly, the crowd grows stronger, drawn outside by the salubrious weather.

The friends move away from the lake, from the noisy picnickers and beggars and hawkers, and into the gardens, where it is quieter, and cooler in the shade. Goethe walks ahead and sits under a great old Turkish oak. He has turned pensive, and Moritz senses this—he is used to his friend’s changeable temperament—and stays quiet; waiting for him, as he will, to share his thoughts.

Sure enough, he begins: “Do you know, in the corner of my studio, next to Tischbein’s portrait, are my most precious items . . . they have been in my possession for the last ten months or so.”

“Tischbein’s painting is less precious?”

“Let’s say it is treasured for reasons other than botany.”

Moritz grins. “What are these items you speak of?”

What he has collected from the botanical garden in Padua.

“I’ve told you,” he says, “I saw many wondrous things there, vegetation new and unfamiliar, plants growing outside that survive only in hothouses in Germany.” Of all the plants, though, the one that struck him most was what Linnaeus calls Chamaerops humilis, the fan palm. “I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I stood there, gazing, unthinking . . . seeing it in a new way.”

Moritz asks him what he means.

“I collected its leaves, not because they are rare or unusual but because in that moment, something stirred in me. An idea!” Goethe breaks off, suddenly too enlivened to sit still. He rises, paces about, then sits down again. “What if all of its lateral outgrowths were simply variations of a single structure—the leaf?”

Moritz shakes his head. He doesn’t follow.

Goethe plucks a flower from a nearby pink. He holds it up. “Once this dianthus was a seed. It fell to the ground, germinated, and its cotyledons appeared . . . Are you familiar with that term?”

“The seed leaves?”

“Yes . . . which may be fleshy and quite unleaflike, but if you look carefully, you can see the veins . . . which makes them modified leaves. The formations that follow on the stem”—here he points to the leaves on the pink—“are commonly known as foliage leaves, mistaken for the only true leaves.” Then he gestures to the flower. “In an ordinary perfect flower, like this, one with all its parts present, we first see a group of green leaflike sepals, here united in a tube.” He turns the pink upside down. There! Observe!

Moritz nods vigorously.

“Then come the corolla,” continues Goethe, “in this case, five petals, pink in color, they usually lack green pigment, but can be understood as a transformation of the foliage or stem leaf.” He pulls off the petals. “Next are the ten stamens, arranged as a tight outer circle, and whose ends, the anthers, bear pollen. Might they not also be variations of the petal? Can you see?”

He holds it out for Moritz, who peers into it, furrowing his brow.

“Last in the series of modifications are the pistils, the most transformed of the fundamental leaf in the center of the flower . . .” He points. “These become the fruit, and that brings us back to the seed, which carries within itself the seed leaf. Do you see what this means?”

He stands up and paces again, the bedraggled remains of the pink dangling from his hand.

“For Linnaeus, the flowering plant is described as if it were an external assemblage of different parts—leaves, sepals, petals, stamens—separate and independent of one another. There is little hint of any necessary relationship between them. This is the analytical plant, Moritz, the plant as it appears to the intellectual mind.” He holds the pink up in the air. “Of course, Linnaeus did this for a reason . . . He produced his system for organizing plants into species and genera, on the basis of comparing these parts of the plant as they occur in different specimens. But”—he hands the flower to Moritz—“what if there’s another dimension to the plant, an intensive, previously unimagined depth, in which these different organs are intimately related. That they are really all fundamentally one and the same organ. A plant simply as continuity of form.”

“And what would this mean?”

“In place of classification, metamorphosis.”

In the distance rises the sound of chatter, laughter, music; here, a light rustle, a breeze. “What you’re saying . . .” Moritz stops and sits up. “What I think you’re saying is that all these so-called parts may be grouped under one concept?”

“Yes.” Goethe looks up at the canopy, the Turkish oak that embowers them generously. “All is leaf.”

The sun has long set, and the dark is gathering in the east, but they don’t yet make to leave.

“For so long,” says Goethe, “I’ve wondered: might there be an alternative to how I was learning botany. Was there no other way apart from obsessive differentiation, reduction, analysis? And I was led to this . . . this revelation . . . that one fundamental ideal structure lies at the heart of all plant life. In this way nothing is to be divided, Moritz. Where classification separates and fixes and deadens, metamorphosis allows for life. And perhaps this way of thinking has larger repercussions, too . . . Inspiration for a scientific method that unifies, and acknowledges the marvelous simultaneity, and interconnectedness of living phenomenon, rather than forcing upon it a mechanistic sequentiality that doesn’t exist except in our heads. The natural world is no machine, Moritz,” he adds, smiling. “It is alive.”

For a long while, they are quiet. The park spreads before them, cool and empty in the late evening light. Soon it will be too dark for them to find their way back into the city, so they brush themselves off, head toward Villa Medici, and onto the road that will take them to Via del Corso.

Behind them, only the wind moves through the trees.

*  *  *

In early October, Goethe journeys to Castel Gandolfo, fifteen miles southeast of Rome. When he arrives there, his first thought is that it is close to paradise. The village is perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking the waters of Lago Albano, clear, calm, and almost as blue as the waters around Sicily.

He’s here at John Jenkins’s invitation, or rather on an invitation that Angelica has obtained for him from the affluent English antiquarian. Jenkins has lived for many years in Rome, and established himself as cicerone of choice to visiting British tourists. “There’s nothing he can’t arrange,” Schütz had told him. “I heard he once managed for his guests an invitation from the Pope for tea.” When Goethe meets him, he finds this not too difficult to believe. Sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed, and with a crop of wavy light-brown hair, Jenkins reminds him of a shrewd monkey. Luckily, given the size of his house, there isn’t much chance for them to meet too often, and Goethe hopes it stays that way.

It’s a merry party at the mansion, though none of his artist friends are there. Thankfully, Angelica is staying nearby, and he will have her for company. After a few days at Castel Gandolfo, he realizes that this autumn resort is remarkably similar to a spa town, like the one he visits annually at Karlsbad—persons who have never met before are brought by chance into close contact, while meals, walks and excursions, and conversation encourage rapid intimacy. But here the diversion of discussing in detail about taking the cure and one’s ailments is absent—small talk on other less exhilarating matters must be made. Goethe rises early, and slips away, spending the morning on his own, walking, sketching, bracing himself for the rest of the day when he is expected to be sociable. Meals are taken together, the salons are the scene of gay parties, and comedy plays are performed for their entertainment in the evenings.

 

“It’s impossible not to fall in love here,” declares Angelica.

They are strolling down one of the many covered walks in the garden. It is overhung with a scented variety of rambling rose, and the sun falls soft and dappled on the path.

“If by love you mean rushed affection formed through enforced proximity in an, admittedly, bucolic setting, then yes.”

“Oh, hush, Johann. As the English say, don’t be a bore.”

“My dear Angelica, you know my heart belongs only to you.”

“Nonsense.”

“Well then, to art.”

She makes a face. “Far worse.”

The path leads them along the edge of the garden. Here the beds are planted with autumn crocuses that are just beginning to bloom.

“Not that I don’t think art is the highest and noblest of all callings, and that one shouldn’t be utterly devoted to it.” She turns to him. “But there are some things even art can’t give you.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know—companionship.”

He laughs, and she swats his arm. “It’s true, I tell you.”

“My dear Angelica, I appreciate your concern for this lonely northerner, but I just don’t feel . . . that way inclined for now.”

“And that, my dear, is exactly the moment that love will find you.”

 

The evening after their conversation, when he’s thought about what she said—if only to give himself the pleasure of dismissing it—Goethe is on his way to his room to change for dinner when he meets, suddenly, neighbors from Rome, a lady and her daughter. So far, they’ve only ever exchanged polite greetings, but here they are now brought together like old acquaintances.

“How splendid,” the mother declares. “We’ve often wondered when our paths might properly cross.”

The daughter, Livia, dark-haired and pale complexioned, has a somewhat more reserved manner, but she is charming when spoken to, her Roman dialect distinct and dignified. They are joined by her friend Maddalena, a young woman from Milan who is holidaying with them. She, Goethe notices, is a study in contrast to Livia, with her light blond hair and blue eyes—blue as the waters of Lago Albano. When they speak of Germany, of Weimar, it is she who asks him questions—about the duke, the weather, the theater, the food. She isn’t so much forward as eager to know about things.

He crosses paths with the women often after this, and is always pleased to see them, though the mother less so. She’s pleasant, but he feels that she watches him closely, and is hoping for him to take an interest in her daughter.

On a series of windy days, when the party stays mostly indoors, he plays cards with the young women, and enjoys himself very much. They play a game similar to lotto, where players form betting alliances—he first pools his stake with Livia, and then, as the game proceeds, with Maddalena. When it ends, the mother, who’s been a bystander all this while, says pointedly, “You need to choose, you know, Signor Goethe. It isn’t comme il faut to shift allegiances like this.”

“I apologize, madame,” he says, trying to stifle a smile at her French. “In my country it is customary to be polite and attentive to all the ladies.”

 

Early next morning, he slips away on his own again, and takes a walk through the garden. There’s a light mist on the water, and a haze still rises from the grass. Everything is damp with dew. It’s marvelous to be out here before anyone is up.

Is he getting old? Does he solely desire his own company now, and that of only a few others? No, it isn’t that, though perhaps everything that takes him away from writing he begrudges—and no writing will happen in this sociable place.

It is nice to have the garden to himself.

But soon he realizes someone else is also there—walking behind the rosebushes, shockingly unchaperoned.

“Oh! It’s you!” Maddalena sounds pleased, he thinks—or perhaps she’s just relieved. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you,” he says.

“Breathing,” she replies, and smiles, and suddenly the sun is out. “What are you looking at?”

He shows her. An aloe plant from India—and it doesn’t look happy to be here. “It will probably never bloom,” he says, “and in Sicily I was too early to see any flower. Most exasperating.”

“You have traveled to Sicily?” Her voice is tinged with envy. “Have you seen Etna?”

He admits he has, although he’s afraid he only managed to climb Vesuvius.

“You climbed Vesuvius?” Her mouth falls opens, her eyes widen.

“Three times.”

He likes her curiosity, and her capacity for amazement. It is refreshing. And maybe she thinks admiringly of him, too. Of course it’s too soon to tell. Since they cannot walk back to the house together, they stand for a while by the drooping aloe.

“It’s not proper to complain,” she says, “but I haven’t always been allowed to study as much as I wanted.” She gazes out, beyond the waters of Lago Albano. “We aren’t taught to write, for fear we might write love letters. We wouldn’t even be taught to read if we didn’t have to read our prayer books.” She looks back at him. “How many languages do you know?”

Four, he says, five, though not all equally fluently.

She laughs, but doesn’t sound mirthful. “Nobody would dream of teaching us foreign languages. I would give anything to know English . . . I often hear Mr. Jenkins, Signora Angelica, Signore Zucchi, and others talking to one another in English, and I listen with envy . . . I see all those meter-long English newspapers lying on the table, full of news from all over the world, and don’t know what they are saying . . .”

Before he can stop himself, he’s saying, “It’s a shame . . . especially since English is so easy to learn . . . Why don’t we have a try later?”

“Could we?” Her eyes glint like blue diamonds.

His heart hammers in his ears. “Yes, of course.”

 

The lesson takes place that evening. Goethe picks up one of the English papers from the dining table, glances through it quickly, and chooses an article for his pupil.

First, he translates all the nouns, and tests her to see whether she remembers what they mean. She is quick and clever, grasping them easily. Next they tackle causative, qualifying, motivating words, with him pointing them out to her in as entertaining a fashion as he can, showing her how they bring the whole to life. At the end, without any prompting, she reads an entire passage aloud quite as easily as if it had been printed in Italian, accompanying her reading with the most graceful gestures. He notices she furrows her brow when she’s stuck on a word. It is endearing.

He is, very quickly, losing his heart.

Around them, visitors increase in number; Angelica has also arrived at the long common table. His pupil is standing on the other side, and while the others are taking their seats for dinner, without a moment’s hesitation, Maddalena walks around and sits next to him. Angelica looks surprised; she can see at a glance that something has happened. Goethe, outwardly, manages to control himself fairly well, though he, too, is struck by her boldness—she sits there enraptured by him, by the foreign language she has just learned, and like someone blinded by a sudden long-wished-for vision who does not know how to readjust herself to these normal surroundings.

Things progress well, though, over the next few days; they snatch moments together whenever they can, in the company of Livia or Angelica. The former seems oblivious of any goings on; the other seems pleased. They walk the gardens together, stop to admire the lake, play endless card games, steal glances through the evening’s entertainment.

Her English lessons, too, continue, and she improves, swiftly.

“You,” she tells him, breathlessly, “are a new world.”

And then and there, he wishes to take her into his arms—And you are simply too bright, too beautiful to bear. Now he cannot, will not, hold back. Goethe feels something in his chest loosening, as though a binding is being undone. He permits it, that rush of excitement, the dizzying happiness of early attraction. Should he write her a poem, pick her some wildflowers, or—Does he dare? Is it too soon?—offer to make a sketch of her?

He can barely sleep, the nights too long before he can see her again the next morning, and then the day is too hastily gone. In him rises rapidly the anticipation of new affection. In her it appears to blossom, too. Doesn’t she look up at him with nothing less than adoration? He warms at the thought.

 

One evening, he goes looking for his young friends, his new beloved, when he chances upon the older ladies sitting in the pavilion. “Come join us,” they insist, and he has little choice as space is made at the window with the best view.

It isn’t long before he realizes that they are discussing that inexhaustible subject: a trousseau—what would be needed, the number and quality of the wedding presents, the essential items the family will be giving. The conversation then turns to the happy couple—the merits of the bridegroom, whose shortcomings, which were no secret, would certainly be corrected by the intelligence, grace, and amiability of his bride. Uninterested though he is, Goethe asks discreetly who the bride might be. They’re all surprised and then remember he isn’t a friend of the family.

“It’s Maddalena,” says Livia’s mother archly.

“Oh,” he says, “I see.”

After this, he manages to disengage himself from the company and goes for a long walk. All the way out of the grounds, down through the small cobbled village to the lake, and then a path that runs along the bank. All passion is extinguished beside the cool, clear water. He returns very late, and the next morning takes off again, after leaving word that he won’t be back for dinner. He tramps up hills and through forests, grieving, at first, for a love lost, a love still tender, snatched away too soon—and then for something else.

After so long, he’d felt the way he’d done in his youth, when love was an arrow, strong-feathered, with freshly sharpened points that pierced to the marrow and quickly inflamed the blood. And losing this meant, in some way, also losing a part of himself.

But am I not old enough to know better? he chides himself. To pull myself together without fuss or fury? How terrible, though, to be unwittingly taught so cruel a lesson.

The rest of his days at the mansion, he avoids the company of the three women—and when he does encounter them is polite and unfussy in his exchanges with Maddalena.

“Will we not have another lesson?” she asks him, her eyes wide in disappointment.

“Perhaps later,” he says. In another lifetime.

 

On his return to Rome, he finds it has rained and the city is fresh and newly green.

But the pile of letters awaiting him deepens his gloom. Mostly from his friends in Weimar who are impatient now with his absence. Too long, dear Goethe, too long! Will you ever return? And one which announces that, inspired by his accounts, they would also like to follow him, travel around Italy, visit Rome. The duke’s mother, Duchess Amalia, expresses that a special wish has long been alive in her heart to make this journey—and she, along with her entourage, would like to begin serious preparations to cross the Alps.

He sits at his table unmoving, suddenly feeling as though the walls around him are pressing close. He attempts a reply, and discards one letter and then another; the right words refuse to come to him.

He stands at the window, looking out at the crowded street, ringing with the cries of beggars, the rumble of carts, and stamp of pedestrians. He feels a sudden flash of anger. He’s worked hard to make Rome his own—and they cannot take it away from him. Perhaps he ought to leave before they arrive. He has a premonition that it won’t go well otherwise. His way of looking at things would not be theirs. Or at least not at first.

It has taken him a whole year to adjust, to rid himself of . . . northerner views . . . and become more a person of the south. To finally breathe more freely here.

Later he allows himself to hope that they won’t embark on the journey at all. How often people make plans, on the spur of the moment, after too much wine, which dissipate like ghosts as soon as morning arrives. He hopes this is so for them.

*  *  *

November heralds the arrival of a new addition to their artist colony—Philipp Christoph Kayser, a German composer and musician who lives in Zurich. A sharp-nosed, birdlike, fussy little man, he has long been acquainted with Goethe, and it is on his suggestion and sponsorship that Kayser is in Rome.

He moves into Goethe’s old room in Via del Corso. The others welcome him, saying they are now complete, their trois—painting, literature, music. “Who could ask for anything more?”

After a piano has been procured for Kayser, and a place found for it—with some difficulty, for either there is too little or too much light, or the acoustics uneven—the composer and Goethe begin work on setting the songs in Egmont to music. The project keeps Goethe intensely busy, and more focused than he has been for a while. He stops drawing almost completely, halts all other literary works in progress, and delays his weekly correspondence. This last, also, because he doesn’t feel motivated to reply—not to Tischbein, asking for news, nor to the duke, who thinks he is wasting his time not “tasting” all the women in Italy. In his head, a flash of blue eyes, light brown hair, the smell of roses, and he places the letters aside.

For now, he devotes himself to their domestic Academy. Here, away from the court, and its courtly duties, is a small paradise. “It is,” he tells Moritz, “what I imagine as an ideal Germany.”

 

The weather turns dry and autumnal. On clear days there is a brilliance and, at the same time, a subtly graded harmony of which one can hardly conceive up in the north. Goethe acquires a set of watercolors by a minor artist to send to his friends in Weimar. They fall short of capturing the colors in the landscape—brilliant and earthy now, merging into a haze in the distance, softened by the atmosphere—but he thinks he himself can do no better.

When the promise of fine days continues, Goethe sets out on a short walking tour with Bury and Kayser. They arrive at Frascati, and from there walk to Monte Cavo via Rocca di Papa. They manage to get to Ariccia and Genzano, back to Albano and Castel Gandolfo, from where they return to the city. Along the way, he misses Moritz, his botanical companion—especially when he finds some trees, apart from the evergreens, that are still in leaf, including the chestnuts, though their leaves have turned yellow. He even comes upon a plane tree, and remembers Greta, his young companion on the coach journey from Munich to Mittelwald. It all seems so long ago, the flight across the Alps. And here he is, poised again between past and future, north and south, with his time in Italy running out.

 

On his return to Rome, he shares with Moritz his plans for a Harmonia Plantarum. It came to him on the walking expedition, he explains, the idea of publishing a new system of botany that would supplement Linnaeus’s Genera Plantarum. Instead of dividing and counting, this would offer “a harmony of plants,” he says. “A botanical survey that goes beyond taxonomy to morphology, beyond the classification of species in separate compartments to their continuity as a single process of formation.”

Regarding the development of this Harmonia Plantarum, various strategies could be adopted, just as in any other harmonic work. But what might be best for this? What schema should they adopt? Perhaps none! Perhaps they ought to throw out all the old uniform methods of investigation! After all, what could be more detrimental to a project such as this?

“It will be like nothing anyone has set eyes upon before,” says Moritz happily.

 

Some afternoons, while they are in the company of the others, talk on botany also comes up, though it tends to be more general and wide-ranging. Once, they are lounging in the gardens of Villa Pamphili, the weather cool and golden, a cloud of pigeons wheeling above them in shimmering gray unison. The topic under discussion—for everyone is in a silly mood—is what everyone wishes to be in the afterlife. A horse for Bury, a cat for Schütz; Hackert says himself, and rather than this being disqualified, the others echo in chorus, “But why?”

Hackert is not amused.

Moritz says he would like to be a dragonfly.

Then they realize that Goethe hasn’t yet given them a reply. He is lying on his back, hat over his eyes. “An oak tree,” he replies. A good choice, they concur—to be sure, it’s the closest to immortality, living so many hundreds of years.

“If conditions permit,” adds Goethe.

For certain. Although, on second thought, might it not be tiresome to be stuck in one place all of one’s life?

“If by stuck you mean that you cannot physically move, then I suppose yes,” says Goethe. Else it would seem to him that plants live an ideally rich life, dynamic and ever-transforming, resilient and connected, reaching out into the world, not just toward the sky but into the earth and being in touch with air and wind and sunshine and soil.

Here he plucks at the grass and throws it up like confetti.

“They show us the necessity of inculcating an awareness of being sensitive to context . . . indeed, if not so, they wouldn’t survive, would they? And the result? No two plants are the same,” he adds, “even within the same species, if their environments differ slightly even fifty meters apart.”

Surely not, his friends protest. It cannot be!

“Have you not noticed? What you all suffer from is a penchant to generalize,” says Goethe.

At this, there is further profuse objection, but he shakes his head. “It is true. What do you see when you look at a field? A forest? Foliage, in general? A hazy impression of green? But to take the time to look, to observe closely, would allow for a revelation of great and exhilarating diversity.”

All right, they concede, perhaps this is true. But what he said about plants of the same species differing drastically in growth meters from each other . . . this sounds difficult to believe.

Wait, says Goethe, sitting up. He is happy to conduct an experiment for them. He rises, instructing them not to train their eye on him, nor to follow, and he disappears into the woodland. He’s gone longer than they expected. What is he doing, they wonder.

“God knows,” says Schütz. “To this day, I understand little the things he does.” Remember when he told them he wished to let his eye be single?

“Hush,” says Moritz, “I’m certain he will return with plants.”

Sure enough, when he emerges, he’s holding one in each hand. “Behold,” he says triumphantly, “the lowly but lovely Lactuca muralis . . . wall lettuce.” He holds them out. “What do you observe?”

His friends blink up at him. At first glance, the one in his right hand is taller, with a more complex web of roots, while the other is smaller and more sparse.

“And to what might the differences between them be related?”

A chorus pipes up in reply, a flurry of unintelligible voices.

Goethe sits down before them and requests silence. “The urge to know is strong, but I want us to restrain that urge, and take time to observe the plants. Why do we always wish to explain something before we have even considered it with care?” He glances at the wall lettuce. “What can we learn from these?”

 

The group offer up their observations: the one in his right hand, Iphigenia, let’s call her, has more profusely branching roots and her foliage leaves are short-stalked and strongly divided. The other, Orestes, has a few long main roots and long-stalked leaves with larger, wider blades.

“The leaves are also oriented differently,” adds Moritz.

Goethe smiles and nods at him.

“The leaves on Iphigenia are perpendicular to the stem and curve downward, in the other the leaf stalk grows noticeably up and out from the main stem. I suppose you could say it’s wider.”

“Good,” says Goethe. “I can tell you now that we’re dealing here with an environmental difference . . . One of the plants was growing in half-shade and the other in full sunlight. But which is which?”

There is a moment’s pause as the young artists examine them closely. Now, admittedly, they’re intrigued.

“This one is the shade plant,” says Bury, gesturing toward Iphigenia. “It’s taller because it’s reaching for light, and its roots need to spread out and branch and find nutrients to compensate for the lack of sunlight.”

“No,” interjects Schütz, “it’s exactly the opposite. Iphigenia is growing in full sunlight, can’t you tell? It has plenty of light and so it can spread out and form more roots. The smaller one has been growing in the shade—it branches less because of less light, and its leaves are broader to catch more light.”

Moritz agrees. “Although,” he adds, after a moment’s hesitation, “Orestes looks more harmonious somehow . . . and well proportioned. An expression of more light, wouldn’t you say?”

Bury furrows his brow. “You mean Iphigenia is more straggly?”

The arguments and counterarguments continue—while Goethe sits aside, in quiet amusement.

“Well?” they say finally, turning to him. “Which is which?”

“To begin with,” he says, “as you can see, both perspectives have their merits. This is a fruitful exercise in speculation, is it not? How easily we may come up with convincing explanations that are in and of themselves coherent. Coherent explanations, such as the ones you have provided, may contradict each other and may have little to do with reality. The only way to solve the dilemma is through the phenomena themselves. We must go back and inquire which plants grew in which conditions.”

He rises once again, and the group follows him into the woodland, all the way to the crumbling grotto. Iphigenia, he explains, was growing in a clump before it, in full sunshine. Orestes toward the back, behind the rockwork, where the ground is cooler and in the shade. “Here the plant stays simpler and ramifies less boldly into the environment,” says Goethe, “while light calls forth greater differentiation.”

In this way, he lectures them gently: learn to look, with patience, with rigor, withhold judgment, and go back always to context: this is where life—of plants and people, he adds with a smile—is differentiated.

*  *  *

This year, Christ is born amidst thunder and lightning—a massive storm that dissuades the party from attending mass at various churches as they did last year. In fact, this Christmas for Goethe is a solitary affair; he spends it in a lower quarter of Rome, not too far from the river, in a monastery complex with three chapels built on a site called Tre Fontane. According to legend, it’s the spot at which St. Paul was martyred, three fountains springing up where his decapitated head bounced on the ground.

Inside one of the chapels, large and unadorned—and the reason he is here—are paintings of Christ and his Apostles, life-size, one to a pillar, endowed by Raphael with their distinctive attributes and character. Goethe is filled with them, even when he returns to the city: John noble and beautiful, Thomas grave and sad, Christ walking toward him, his hand raised in blessing. Something of their melancholy stays with him as the year draws to a close, and even when the new one opens.

His walks with Moritz, also, fail to cheer him.

One dank winter day, the friends find themselves in a square in front of San Pietro in Montorio. They’ve attempted a stroll despite the overcast weather, and although there hasn’t been any rain, the wind is sharp and unwelcome. They had intended to continue to the Baths of Caracalla, but they decide to cut their rambling short and head home. Back at Via del Corso, Kayser is improvising at the piano, Schütz and Hackert are quarreling over the merits of Sulzer’s ideas on art, while Bury listlessly dangles a string for Callisto the cat, who bats at it with a lazy paw. Moritz and Goethe join the subdued party, sinking low into their armchairs.

The mood remains glum—until Reiffenstein enters, exclaiming that he thought he’d lost his way and had walked into a crypt by accident. He hustles them up and out the door—tonight they dine at Osteria alla Campana, he announces, and when he’s met with cries that everyone, at the moment, is deeply impoverished, declares generously that it is his treat for the New Year.

Their spirits rise on the way, and then even higher after a carafe or two. A group of Schütz and Bury’s artist friends are also at the Campana that evening, and so they all merge into a larger, merrier, more raucous party.

Goethe is trying to throw it off, the sinking feeling that’s been plaguing him lately, that Easter, when his time here will end, is fast approaching. He looks around him, the faces that he has come to know and love, the friends who have formed a warm circle around him. Maybe it’s the wine, or the melancholy, but he feels a disconsolate sense of loss—close to the grief of losing someone beloved.

He tries to draw himself back into the evening—someone is telling a funny story about scholarly friends who take the ferry from near the Vatican, and on the way are locked in an intense argument. If they disembark at Ripetta they will have to separate, and the argument will be left unresolved. So they all decide to do the crossing a second time, but by now they’ve really got going and even this extension is insufficient. “Just keep going up and down,” they tell the ferryman, who has no objection since he’s earning a baiocco for each passenger and crossing. He complies with their wishes in complete silence until his little son asks in puzzlement, “What are they doing this for?” And he replies laconically, “Don’t know. They’re all mad.”

The table erupts in laughter, and even Goethe chuckles. He looks up and glimpses the young woman with the dark hair who had smiled at him the last time he was here. Since this is a family-run trattoria, she’s clearly part of the family. The middle-aged man with the magnificent mustache, who manages the place, looks too young to be her father. And, he hopes, too old to be her husband. After they order food, Goethe finds himself looking to see if she will serve them. And she does. She sets the plates down, one in front of Goethe, and they glance at each other. There’s a small brown mole to the right of her upper lip, and suddenly he wants to kiss her. It’s a strange feeling, strong as it is instinctive. Goethe, who prides himself on forming attachments over intellectual compatibility, conversations about favorite books, for instance, has rarely felt anything as explicitly carnal. At least not since the early, heady days with Charlotte. A feeling that he vanquished like sin when she came to realize it and was upset—though surely it couldn’t have come as a surprise as she’d claimed? We’re wedded, she’d said, in the higher realm of mind and spirit. All right, he’d replied, and there it had remained.

“Faustina!” someone shouts from the kitchen.

She turns, and answers, “Coming, Uncle!”

Goethe tucks happily into his plate of macaroni.

There isn’t any opportunity for more elaborate interaction, apart from quick, secret glances and small smiles. The trattoria is busy tonight, their table large and rowdy, and she’s constantly being summoned by her uncle or, he presumes, her mother. He watches as she skips lightly between tables and customers—petite and quick, and efficient, and her face only grows in loveliness to him. She is adorable! Perhaps it’s the warmth inside the osteria, or the wine, but he wishes he could somehow, impetuously, make her acquaintance. But he can’t and she couldn’t possibly do the same.

The next time she’s at their table, clearing the empty plates, she accidentally knocks over a glass of wine. “Oh! Mi dispiace,” she exclaims. As she mops it up, she dips her fingers in the spilled liquid and traces lines on the table, doing this so quickly that none of the party notices except for the intended recipient.

At first, Goethe can’t quite make out what it is. An upside-down “V” and before that a mark. It isn’t intelligible. Until he realizes they aren’t letters, they’re numbers. IV. Four. Four what, though? He looks back at her, in confusion, but she’s gone, hurrying to the kitchen. He studies it a while until a thought, through the haze of the Falernian, slowly dawns upon him. Could it be a proposal . . . for them to meet . . . at this appointed hour?

 

He’s walked in Rome at night many times, but this is the latest he’s been out.

At 3:50 a.m. the streets are eerily silent, beggars’ bodies slumped on the side of the roads emptied of carts and carriages. It’s dark, darker than he thought it would be. And the smell of horse dung and garbage is strong, rising up to his nose in sickly sweetness.

He must be mad. He’d thought himself mad in Naples, living, for a while, a life untethered to anything—art, responsibilities, intellect—but this is a different kind of madness. He’s stumbling around in the dark at this godforsaken hour, following an invitation written in wine.

He hadn’t seen the mysterious Faustina again before they left the trattoria; most of their party was more than lightly inebriated, and it was a task getting everyone to leave. Bury and Schütz insisted on building a fire at home, despite pleas from Goethe that it was late. Then they consigned all their “bad” art into the flames. “You too, you too,” they insisted. “Is there a poem you just can’t rhyme? A libretto that’s failing? A play that won’t resolve itself? Burn them all!” To keep them quiet, Goethe complied—throwing in blank paper, though his housemates were too drunk to notice. Finally, at three, they collapsed. One in his bed, the other beside it.

If all went well, Goethe’s night had only just begun. So he slipped out quietly, although he doubted if even the apocalypse would awaken them, and made his way back to the river, and then down once again to Vicolo della Campana.

Only now, when he nears the osteria, does he think this might be lunacy. What if she’d done it in jest? Or worse, unintentionally. Maybe he’d imagined it all.

The January night is cold, but Goethe finds himself perspiring, his hands clammy, his heart racing. Also, how would he know where to go? The osteria would be closed, and the family sleeping. Where did they live? Above the restaurant? He realizes he hasn’t really thought this one through. If his flight to Italy was the most impulsive thing he’d done in his life, this is even more so. Eventually, he decides he’ll walk past the osteria twice. If there is no indication that someone—Faustina—is waiting for him, he’ll leave and just treat this as a late-night saunter. Even if he does meet her, though . . . what then? He tries not to think of her mouth, that delicate mole.

As expected, Osteria alla Campana is tightly shuttered, and no one, not even the friendly neighborhood drunks seem to be about. He walks down the street once. Above the osteria, the row of windows remains darkened. The door locked. He turns to walk back, convinced he’s the biggest fool to have been born. “This is where lust leads you,” he chides himself.

Just then, a wooden gate, quite hidden, next to the osteria is unlatched and opened a sliver. A single word is uttered. “Come.”

And he follows. If he’s robbed, killed, so be it. The gate leads to a narrow side alleyway, lined with doors. The smell of oil and garlic hangs in the air. Cats scrounging through garbage scatter at their feet. He follows a slight, darkly cloaked figure. They don’t speak until they’ve climbed up some stairs to a room, large enough, with one shuttered window, and simple furniture—a table, a bed, a chair. No curtains of silk, no embroidered mattresses here. The door that opens, he assumes, into the rest of the house is locked and bolted.

She pushes back the hood of her cloak. They look at each other and laugh.

“You’re mad!”

“No, you are!”

“I thought you wouldn’t come.”

“I thought maybe I’d imagined it all.”

“That I was being so forward?” She raises an eyebrow.

“That you would wish to be so forward with me.”

She moves closer. Her eyes catch the light, they’re the color of the darkest bark of trees.

“What’s your name?”

“Johann.”

She furrows her brow, but remains quiet.

“And you are Faustina.”

“So I am.” She moves to discard her cloak, and then sits on the edge of the bed.

“Usually, I sleep here with Ettore.”

“Who is Ettore?” Husband, he’s thinking, alarm bells sounding in his head.

Faustina smiles. “He’s my son. Tonight I make him sleep with his nonna.” She gestures to the locked door.

“Your son,” Goethe repeats before he can stop himself.

“He’s three years old and very clever.”

“Just like his mother, then.”

“Far cleverer than me!” she declares.

And the father? But since she doesn’t mention him, perhaps it is inappropriate to ask. It would be too much, too soon. In fact, all this is too much and slightly surreal.

He sits next to her on the bed. She doesn’t move. Her mouth, her mole, her neck are all temptingly close. He doesn’t know how to proceed, what it is that he should do? Perhaps she senses this, for she leans forward a little, and they kiss.

 

By the time he leaves for Via del Corso, it is past dawn. The streets are being swept, the stray dogs are awake, and the early morning carts and coaches carrying bread and fish and other fresh produce are on the move.

He feels more inebriated than any wine has ever made him. And more alive. She is magnificent! And he wants to shout it out to all the world.

Back home, the artists haven’t stirred. The fire, though, has died. He tiptoes into his room, falling asleep with the memory of looking down at her, her dark hair spread out on the pillow.

*  *  *

Over the next few weeks, the preparations for Carnival reach peak frenzy.

Last year, he’d avoided it all, being in a strange mood, feeling that Rome had somehow let him down. Complaining about the noise filtering up to his room while he tried to work, of the masked revelers and horses clogging up the roads. This time, though, the revelry allows freer license for him to meet Faustina, and for this reason he’s out and about amidst the celebrations.

Something in him also feels lifted, lighter. And he finds he enjoys the spectacle rather than resenting it. This Carnival, the fancy dress trend seems to be for stable-boy costumes, though the usual traditional characters are also present—peasant girls, women from Frascati, fishermen, Neapolitan boatmen, and the Greeks. Once, on his way to the osteria, a figure wrapped in a sheet hops out at him from the shadows, hoping to be taken for a ghost.

At first, with Faustina, it is a series of simple assignations. He drinks and dines at the osteria in the evening, and watches to see whether she traces out a time on the table. Will they meet? Won’t they? It is a deliciously tentative suspense. And in the midst of the Carnival, this subterfuge and secrecy seems also somehow appropriate. He arrives at the designated time, she opens the gate for him, and he leaves at dawn. The only thing that changes is that he now awakens at noon, where once he was an early riser.

“Up late working,” he tells Bury and Schütz, standing, looking worried, at the foot of his bed.

Moritz, too, has no inkling that he’s embarking on these adventures, even though he asks more than a few times why his friend seems a little distracted.

“Oh, just thinking about something I’m working on.”

He shares the news only with the duke: I can now report on some agreeable promenades . . . You are perfectly correct, that such moderate motion refreshes the spirits and puts the body into a delightful equilibrium.

Perhaps, he catches himself thinking, this will all be over after Carnival. That their trysts, like the revelry, will be discontinued. But even after Ash Wednesday, her instructions appear on the table. In fact, he notices, they begin to summon him at an earlier hour. Good, he thinks, I’ll finally get some sleep.

Turns out, he’s still there until dawn.

This is because, after they make love, they’ve started talking. Blessedly, she knows nothing of Werther and his sorrows. And rather than answering questions about himself, which is what tends to happen once it is known who he is, he is able to demonstrate his deep interest in her. Her life in Rome, which he considers the capital of the world, and she simply calls home. All she’s known here, she says, is the osteria, occasional trips to the sea, and her son. The father had died no more than six months after his birth.

“He wasn’t a bad man,” she says, “just most of the time drunk.”

“Why did you marry him?”

She doesn’t reply immediately. “It was time. I was nearly twenty. He was . . . well, the best thing I can say about him is that he was kind.”

She turns to him. Her cheeks are reddened, her dark luxuriant hair tangled. She smells of sweat, and faintly of the osteria. They kiss long and deep, and he feels his heart fill with both happiness and sorrow. Soon it will be Easter, and by then he will have more than a city to leave.

 

He begins to bring paper and pen to her room. He sketches her, naked on the bed.

“My hair is not falling over my breasts,” she complains, looking at a finished picture. “Why have you drawn it so?”

“For modesty?”

She makes a face. “Modesty is a man’s word. Draw me as I am. Only then are you a true artist.”

And so, blushing furiously, he does.

He brings some of his work to show her. His sketches of Rome. He wants, he realizes, her approval. Why it should matter so much, he has no idea. Except that she is seeing with the eye of the everyday, the unelevated, and he feels there is some instinctive truth in this that all of art history—and his many admirers—cannot muster.

“What is this, Johann?” she asks, holding up a sketch.

“Why, it’s the Colosseum. Isn’t it obvious? Surely I’m not as unskilled as all that . . .”

“Oh, I know it’s the Colosseum, but where are the beggars who live near this wall? And the homeless family who burn a fire here every night?”

“They weren’t there?”

“They’re always there,” she says impatiently. She sifts through the rest of the drawings. “Everything looks so . . .”

“Ugly? No. That’s not what you were going to say.”

She looks at him. Her eyes narrow, displeased. “I was going to say, everything looks so perfect. Too perfect. Unreal.”

“But these are mementos . . . you know, to show my friends in Weimar, when I return.”

At this, she falls silent, and so does he.

“Then why are you showing them to me?”

“Because . . .”

“So you can gather my untrained opinions and make fun of me with them.”

“No,” he says desperately. “No.”

“Then why?”

“Because you see Rome with the kind of clarity I envy.”

She softens. She places her hand on his face. “It makes me sad to think of you leaving,” she says with a directness and simplicity he’s come to adore.

And because love is about seeing yourself as you are seen by the beloved, he asks, “Why will it make you sad?” She lies back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. “Because,” she says simply, “my days are full of you in places where I didn’t know they were empty.” They hold each other, deep and tight, until long past dawn.

 

By now, the others have guessed that something is up—even if they’re not sure what. When he tells them “the curse of the second pillow has been lifted,” it is met with resounding cheers and many congratulations. To Angelica, he says nothing. Moritz, when informed, is subdued. Until Goethe assures him that he and Faustina only meet at night, and that his days are as free and unencumbered as they always were. They still have time for their evening walks, to talk of literature, and art, and botany.

Recently, they have started favoring a new garden—the one at Villa Mattei, on the summit of the Caelian Hill. Not only is it beautifully laid out, but works of art from the family’s collection are also displayed on the lawns. Here they wander, admiring the obelisk in the villa’s theater or resting at the fountains overlooked by Poseidon and his giant spear.

They also begin their own small botanical projects—ones that require, as Goethe calls it, for gentle empiricism, to watch and observe carefully and faithfully. “Have no wish to explain the plant . . . I would say merely observe, but so closely that you become identical with it.”

Moritz says he will try.

They walk around the garden, looking to see what draws them—the boxwood, the juniper trees, or the dangling pendent trusses of wisteria. What will each reveal?

The problem, of course, is that gentle empiricism requires time, and Goethe doesn’t know how much of that he has.

 

One evening, after a day out like this, he finds a letter waiting from the duke.

The letter is warm and filled with personal and political news, and it also asks Goethe to stay on in Italy to await the arrival of the dowager duchess later in the year.

He rushes out of the house, unable to contain his unbounded joy. All these streets, and houses, and beggars, and antique ruins will be his for a while longer. Then he returns, and begins composing a reply almost immediately—he will be ready, of course, to leave as planned after Easter, but he could devote all these extra months to paving the way for the dowager’s arrival by presenting himself to the French and imperial ambassadors, to royalty. He would prepare the ground in Naples, Florence, wherever else she might wish to visit. His earlier misgivings are forgotten in the happiness of being able to stay on.

When he meets Faustina later that night, he kisses her and lifts her up in an embrace.

“To what do I owe this jubilation?”

When he tells her, she covers her face with her hands.

“I thought this would make you happy,” he says in alarm. “Faustina, tell me, what’s the matter?”

When he prises her hands apart, he finds that she is laughing. He clasps her and they fall onto the bed, feverishly taking off each other’s clothes, and they do not part from each other for hours.

*  *  *

Perhaps it is the expectation that he will remain here for many months to come that acts as catalyst, but suddenly Rome is in spring.

Everywhere laurel, viburnum and box peaches, almonds, and lemons come into bloom, and the gardens are bursting with anemones, hyacinths, and primroses. He and Moritz can now properly resume their botanical excursions. The pots of prickly pear are doing well in his room, and he’s also added to his collection. Seeds from a pine cone that are giving out promising shoots. Some date palms that he’s grown from stones. With Moritz he gathers more, violets, yellow-flowering celandine, fennel, ground elder, and even a sapling of mulberry.

“I’ve been thinking about your shade-and-light experiment,” Moritz tells him, one afternoon as they are wandering through the wilderness just beyond the Borghese Gardens—out of the city limits, and untended. “For the first time, I realized the diversity and differentiation in plants of the same species depend on where one finds them.”

“Much like people, don’t you think?” Goethe is in a playful mood.

“Do you reckon, then, that plants of different species respond to differing environmental conditions in a similar way?”

“Good question. And yes, remarkably, at least from what I’ve observed, this is so.”

They stop at two pines that have grown in strange ways, leaning against each other.

“It’s a duality, isn’t it?” Goethe continues. “The plant has the ability to integrate itself into the environment in such a way that it reflects in all its parts its relation to that particular environment.”

“And this, too, is like people.”

They also continue their discussions on the Harmonia Plantarum, and even begin tentatively laying out illustrations for the compendium. This might be Goethe’s first scientific publication, and in the face of Moritz’s visible excitement, and his own, he tries to discard his misgivings—rare as it is for him to have any over his work—about how a text like this from his pen might be received. At worst ridicule, at best indifference.

And why so? Because, as he’d once told Tischbein, the public demands that every man remain in his own field. Sadly, this was how the world seemed to be proceeding, narrow and constrained, knowledge splintered and sorted until it lay broken and bereft of all life, all resonance. It would soon be a punishable offense to be interested in everything. To seek knowledge regardless of where it originated, and to love it precisely for its vast, exuberant interconnectedness.

About all this Moritz is unperturbed.

“I think,” he says, surveying their work, “that this will change the world.”

 

On some days, Goethe goes plant collecting with Faustina and her son, even though with the child present it turns into playtime. He is a cheerful boy, dark-eyed and dark-haired like his mother, and can be kept happily occupied by gelato and strawberries.

Sometimes it’s just him and Faustina who walk through the city together. It is unlike strolling around with anyone else. Here, Faustina remembers, they would get their milk and cheese—from a dairy next to the Pantheon. He laughs in delight.

“What’s so funny?” she asks in puzzlement.

“For you the Pantheon is a landmark for the dairy, and not the other way around.”

At the Colosseum, she distributes alms, just as her family has done for years. Which is how she knows the beggars who live there. They come to greet her, thankful for the gifts. For her, the Roman Forum, which she barely glances at, is the place to find the freshest peaches, from a lady she fondly calls Nonna. In Piazza Navona, at the Fontana del Nettuno end, is an alleyway of blacksmiths, from where she buys the strongest pots and pans for her uncle’s kitchen.

This is when, for Goethe, Rome truly comes alive. The stone finally speaks.

When they lie in bed later, he strokes her, as he likes to, gently tapping along the length of her spine. Her woolen dress, alongside his clothes, lies crumpled on the floor.

“I’d like to thank you,” he says.

“For what?” She turns to lie against him, her head resting on the curve of his arm.

“For your Rome.”

She smiles sleepily. It’s late, and it has been a long, busy evening at the osteria.

“Rome, though you are a whole world,” he says, “a world without love would be no world.” She lifts her head, smiling. He leans over, kisses her. “And if there were no love, Rome would not even be Rome.”

She snuggles closer into him. “You should be a poet.”

 

While Goethe awaits the duke’s response to his letter—which he’s quite certain will be positive, and allow him to play courtier for the dowager later in the year—he keeps himself busy. His nights are mostly well occupied, but the hours in a day are long.

He reads Herder’s new book, Ideas for the History of Philosophy of Humanity, and enjoys it enormously. “The end is magnificent!” He continues to work on Faust, a play he began fifteen years ago—and an unwieldy beast. The more he writes, the further it seems from completion. Perhaps, he considers in jest, I shall have to sell my soul to the devil to finish it.

What keeps him buoyed are reactions from Weimar on Egmont, which have been mostly favorable—“bold,” “seamless,” “profoundly moving,” and only one tentative “some scenes too long.” Charlotte, though, has not expressed much enthusiasm for the play. I suspect, he writes to her, you have been more pained than pleased by it. But it is difficult for a work on this scale to be in perfect tune throughout. I think no one but the artist really knows how difficult art is.

 

One Sunday in early March, he misses mass at the Sistine Chapel for a gallery outing with Angelica. Today they visit the collection at the Accademia di San Luca, and pause before a painting by Guercino, in which a bearded St. Luke gestures to a portrait of the Virgin while a surly angel looks on.

Angelica turns to him and asks, “Well?”

“It’s an unusual piece, is it not? It makes me think of the Christian tradition of image making, and their desire to have the subject connect . . .”

“Not the painting,” she interrupts. “Have you had a think, my dear? The nobleman’s physician’s daughter I wanted to introduce you to . . .”

Lately, she has been trying to present him to her “friends”—eligible young women, he’s noticed, from good families—but he hasn’t followed up on any of her offers. What Angelica is asking now is would he court this young lady? It would be . . . easy. Respectable. To be swiftly engaged, and for them to travel back to Weimar together to be married.

But his mind is drawn to a room without curtains, where a simple woolen dress lies slipped off on the floor.

“If you’d like to . . .” she begins.

“No,” he says quickly. “I’m grateful to you—but at this moment I find I am preoccupied.”

 

For his next meeting with Faustina, he takes her a gift. A shawl of fine merino.

“Oh, Johann,” she says, holding it to her cheek, “there must be nothing softer than this.”

He’s pleased to see her happy.

“What’s the occasion?” she asks.

“Nothing. Just this.” He plants a kiss on her forehead.

From now on, he always brings her presents. Boxes of fruit, dates, walnuts, a dress or two, tickets to the opera for her and her mother, when they are collected in an elegant coach.

“What am I now? Your kept woman?” she teases.

“Rather, I’m your kept man.”

Tonight, they lie in bed sharing a glass of wine; she’s smuggled a bottle from the osteria downstairs. The night is warm, the window stays open, and a sweet breeze blows in, carrying the sound and smells of the city.

“What is your life like in the north?” This is the first time Faustina has ventured to ask a question of such intimacy. He sits up a little, his arm around her, her head on his chest.

“It is cold.”

She turns her head to look up at him. “That’s it?”

He laughs. “I suppose it is lively in its own way.” He tells her he is employed at a small court, but makes out that he works at its very periphery, overseeing this and that. Still, her eyes are wide—at first he thinks in wonder, but rather she is surprised.

“I wouldn’t have placed you as an administrator . . .”

He leans on her heavily, he likes the feel of her bare skin against his. “Where would you place me, then?”

“Right here,” she says, pulling him on top.

They kiss for a long time; his mouth travels to her mole, her ear, down her neck.

When they part, he looks at her. “I have never . . .” he begins, and stops.

“What?” she says, her dark eyes shining.

How should he put this into words?

“For me,” he begins again, “life has never felt so . . . complete. As here in Rome, with you.”

She nuzzles into his shoulder. “For me, too.”

 

When he returns home the next morning, the mail has arrived. Here are the landscape sketches he’d commissioned on his journey through Sicily, also a new edition of Mengs’s writings, letters from Weimar—one from the duke.

He has returned from his Prussian expedition, and after discussions with his mother, Anna Amalia, can confirm that Goethe’s administrative responsibilities, as requested, will be withdrawn. He will have no specific duties, though opportunities for these would certainly appear in due course. He can devote himself to whatever he considers important—including, the duke hopes, as in the past, the improvement of Weimar’s parks. He is also to receive a salary increase of two hundred marks a year.

Reading this, Goethe’s heart is racing, his palms begin to sweat. The news, so far, is good. What then, about Italy?

Both the duke and the dowager agree that there are better things for Goethe to occupy himself with than act as her courtier. He need not feel that for this reason he must tarry in Italy. The letter doesn’t instruct him to return. Or order him to leave Rome at the earliest. Rather, it’s a hint for him to journey back, and it is enough. It cannot be ignored.

The end, when it comes, is quick.

Goethe lays the letter aside.

In due course, all the others here will need to be informed. For now, though, he will shut himself up in his studio, look out the window, and mourn.

He stays in all day, and the next. Afterward, he writes a response to the duke: To your kind and heartfelt letter I reply at once with a joyful: “I come!”

*  *  *

The last month is hectic with the busyness of departure.

And he finds that as soon as he has made his mind up to leave, he loses all interest in everything. He is oddly disconnected—from the city, his friends, and most of all, Faustina. For days, he cannot bring himself to see her, to tell her. Finally, he visits Osteria alla Campana, and sits at a table with an untouched plate of fritti before him, and an unsipped glass of wine. He can tell she is furious.

“Two o’clock,” she whispers angrily, as she pretends to fill his glass.

It is the longest of nights.

“Where have you been?” she spits at him as soon as he enters the room.

When he tells her, slowly, falteringly, she flings the shawl at him, the one he gave her, and then she cries. He cannot bear it; he stands there, unable to move, closer or away, and finally, he leaves.

For days afterward, he doesn’t return.

I am in Rome but I am not in Rome, he writes in his journal. I can’t do anything any more.

He would rather have left immediately after he received the duke’s letter than be here in this strange in-between time—in the flesh, but not in spirit. But there are loose ends to tie up, and so much packing to be done. He looks around helplessly at his studio. He’d had no conception, until now, of how much stuff he’d managed to accumulate. What was he thinking? That he’d be here forever?

He can take a few items—the smaller busts, several Jupiters, the Medusa Rondanini, a Hercules Ajax, and Mercury. He must leave behind the bas-reliefs, casts of terra-cotta works, casts taken from an Egyptian obelisk, and other heavy fragments. The giant Juno head he gives to Angelica. The plants he has been growing he begins to distribute. The pine seedlings for Angelica’s garden. The date palms, or at least the ones not sacrificed to observe the stages of their peculiar growth, he gives to a friend who plants them at the edge of his lawn at his house on Via Sistina. To Bury and Schütz, he hands over the prickly pear cacti, for these are the only plants, they admit, they’ll be able to keep alive.

The days go by and I can hardly bring myself even to look at anything.

The celandine remains in his room until eventually he carries it with him to Osteria della Campana. It’s late afternoon, but he doesn’t care anymore if he is seen. The family are at siesta. When he knocks at Faustina’s door, he can see she hasn’t been resting.

They don’t speak when he enters.

He places the pot on the table, by the window.

“You know . . . celandine comes from the Greek word chelidon, which means ‘swallow,’” he says, “because it comes into flower when the swallows arrive and fades at their departure.”

She looks at him without saying a word.

“And if that’s not enough . . . I grew it myself.”

She still stays silent.

He looks down, at the floor on which so many times their clothes and shoes have been discarded.

“Of all your gifts,” she finally says, “this is the least useful.”

He murmurs that that is true. He stands there, thinking he should leave. That there is little hope for reconciliation. For a last warm, familiar touch.

“But I like it most,” she adds suddenly, “because it is alive.” She presses its small yellow blossoms, its leaves like feathers. “And it hasn’t faded. So maybe the swallows aren’t gone yet, after all.”

 

The last garden that he visits with Moritz is at Villa Albani, lying just outside the city walls. The villa houses a vast collection of antiquities and Roman sculpture, but they aren’t heading inside. This spring day, they are in the garden, where the almond trees are now in leaf, the peach is beginning to shed its blossoms, and the lemon flowers are bursting open in the top branches.

Moritz had no words when he was told Goethe would be leaving, that his date of departure was set for April 24. “But that’s so soon” was all he had to say.

Today he is in a similarly reticent mood. Goethe, too, despite the beautiful surroundings, is subdued. If only he were heading south, not north. Oh, to be back again in Sicily, where all around him lay such richness!

“You know,” he begins to tell Moritz, “at one point while I was there, I found myself on a wild, though possibly futile, quest.”

Moritz glances at him. “A quest for what?”

“The rarest thing.”

“Oh?”

“At first, I wasn’t sure what it would look like . . . but surely if it did exist, and I was certain it did, then there could be no other place in the world than Sicily.”

Moritz frowns. “Why didn’t you mention this to me before?”

Goethe stays silent. “In honesty, because for a while now I’ve been thinking that it cannot be found.”

“You mean . . . you’ve given up?”

He sighs. “If I were ten years younger, I would travel more, search more, go to the farthest places, to America, to India, to look and look again.”

“Look for what?”

They have arrived at the edge of the garden, where terraced beds cut into the hill.

“I was walking by the sea in Naples,” he begins. “It seems so long ago now . . . but there, a certain notion came to me. I wondered if this concept . . . of one fundamental structure, of all being leaf . . . could also be true in a higher sense?”

Moritz nods, listening intently.

“If within the part of the plant we’re accustomed to call leaf lies . . . a shape-shifter, if you like . . . which can hide or reveal itself in all vegetal forms. I wondered, could it not exist as an Urpflanze?”

“Do you mean . . .” Moritz hesitates. “An archetypal plant?”

Goethe looks at him, unable to put into words how much he will miss his company.

“Yes, that is what I mean.” He’d spent much time strolling through the public gardens in Palermo, amidst groves of lemons and orange trees, and thousands of plants he’d never seen before, dazzled by the lushness, the green. “The more I tried to find how these many and diverse forms differed, I always found them more alike than unalike . . . no matter how distinct the shapes of leaves, and flowers, it was not difficult to imagine them related, morphing from one to another in a flow, shape to shape . . . And their similarity kept calling to mind this idea of the Urpflanze.”

Moritz is quiet a moment. “And is that what you were looking for?”

“I was.” The archetypal plant that carried within it all plants of the past, present, and future. “It sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but I’ve had visions of it . . .” he adds. “Would the Urpflanze be the strangest creature in the world? Who knows? But wouldn’t it make it possible to go on forever imagining plants and know that their existence is logical; that is to say, if they do not actually exist, they could, for they’re not shadowy phantoms of some vain overactive imagination, but possess an inner necessity and truth.”

They have walked over to a peach tree, whose blossoms are falling to the ground with every shift of the breeze. Here, like in the north, it might be snowing.

After a long silence Moritz speaks again, hesitant. “What would it look like? I mean, how would you know what to look for?”

Goethe shrugs. “Something simple? Small? Unassuming? Or perhaps at the other extreme, a magnificently complex shape from which all other shapes could be derived . . . In truth, I am not certain.” He looks up at the sky through the branches. “But if I found it, I think I would know.”

“How?”

“I have no reasoned answer,” he confesses. “Only a feeling that I would.”

Before them the peach blossoms shimmer.

“What would it mean to find it?”

Goethe looks at him, smiles. “Perhaps we’ll know when we do? I’ve said before, we must fight the urge to explain and understand prematurely, to come to something with preconceived notions of what it might reveal to us.”

“Then this is not something to give up on . . .”

“Maybe not.” Goethe pauses, looking out over a garden falling slowly into evening. “Maybe you’re right. But I’m journeying back north now, and I feel certain that that is not where the Urpflanze will be found.”

Why not, asks Moritz. Surely the Urpflanze might be found anywhere?

“Possibly,” his friend concedes. “But I sense it might thrive in abundance in a place where conditions for growth are optimal, a place of greater floral diversity.”

“There will be another chance, then, to come south, in the future, another journey . . .”

“Perhaps,” says Goethe, but his heart, and his spirit, tell him there will not.

*  *  *

For the last three nights before he leaves Rome, the moon is full, shining in a clear sky, diffusing its light over the immense city.

At the end of each day, spent packing and sorting his belongings, he takes a walk, once with Bury and Schütz, once with Moritz, and the last on his own. Earlier that day, he’d visited Angelica, who wept as they said goodbye. “Will we meet again?” “Of course, my friend,” he’d replied. It was comforting to say so, even if they both knew it might never happen. That night, he wanders along the Corso—perhaps for the last time—and walks up to the Capitoline, which rises like an enchanted palace in a desert. Faustina would hate that description, he thinks, and laughs, and is filled with sadness. He passes the statue of Marcus Aurelius, and comes to the triumphal arch of Septimus Severus, which casts a large and darker shadow. Along Via Sacra, a main street that’s usually bustling, he’s alone, and the world, the ruins along the road, seem ghostlike and alien to him. Finally, he reaches the Colosseum, which that night fills him not with magic, as it usually does, but with a strange fear.

He stands there, thinking of another poet, Ovid, who was exiled and forced to leave Rome on a black melancholic night like this, lit up by the moon. Cum repeto noctem. When I recall the night. He cannot get him out of his head—with his homesickness and memories of Rome, his sadness and misery on the distant shores of the Black Sea, how he felt he’d abandoned so much of what he treasured.

Goethe, too, had no choice, and soon he, too, would be gone.

He pushes himself to look through the gate into the interior of the ruin. All is still, no voices, no barking dogs. He makes haste and returns home, his soul agitated, his mood no less than elegiac.

 

Early on April 24, a day blue and burnished by the sun, his friends gather around him as he installs himself in the coach.

Kayser is leaving with him, too, but the musician doesn’t seem to feel the same sorrow. Moritz, in a change from his usual self, cannot stop talking. He makes witty remarks and silly jokes. Bury weeps openly. Schütz turns his face away. Goethe settles in, and then Kayser. The postilion blows his horn. Arms reach out, and hold, and wave.

For a moment, everything is frozen, as though everyone, including fate, has changed their minds.

Then the coach begins to move, rumbling down Via del Corso, scattering people and dogs. It gathers pace slowly, across the wide expanse of the piazza, and passes quickly, too quickly, through the Porta del Popolo, down Via Flaminia, and over the old Milvio, bearing Goethe out of Rome.