Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, First Series
1874
John Addington Symonds was a man who saw the Alps and found God. This is travel writing as philosophical meditation, composed by a Victorian mind that believed landscape was less a place than a state of soul. Beginning with a luminous passage across the French plains into the Swiss mountains, Symonds traces his journey through Italy and Greece with the eye of both poet and scholar. He marvels at how the classical world despised what the modern world adores, the savage grandeur of peaks, the wild freedom of highlands. Where the ancients saw deformity and danger, Romantics like Symonds discovered transcendence. Each ruined temple, each sunlit olive grove becomes an occasion for inquiry: what do we seek when we travel? What do we find when we look at the past through landscapes that witnessed it? For Symonds, the journey through Mediterranean antiquity is also a journey inward, toward something like the divine.
