In 1786 Goethe set off for Italy, the country he had been dreaming of ever since he was a child. But how should he observe the beauty of his Arcadia? How not to screw up his eyes at the intensity of the life that runs through everything there, where everything burns, both people’s gestures and the forms of the stones, the depths of the volcanoes and the strange spectacle of “Attitudes” put on by this young courtesan, Lady Emma Hamilton? What Goethe could not see, say or do, he wrote, on returning to Germany. Two centuries later, we take the plane to Naples, the train for Vesuvius, and the ferry for Stromboli. We set off on a journey.