Festival of Art mapping done this morning without braving a threatening sky, so I have been searching the net for the Spoleto section of Goethe’s Italian Travels. Turns out, I am quickly coming to believe, his remarks come down to a solitary paragraph, though one celebrated for its importance to Goethe’s developing aesthetic:
I climbed Spoleto, and was on the aqueduct, which is also a bridge from one mountain to another. Through all their centuries, the ten brick arches which reach across the valley have stood there so quietly, and the water still flows in every corner of Spoleto. I have now seen three works by the ancients; they all have the same great meaning, a second nature serving civic ends. That is how they built, and there they are: the amphitheater, the temple, and the aqueduct. Only now do I feel how justified my hatred of all willful things was, the winter barracks on the Weissenstein, for example, a nothing around nothing, a monstrous layer of icing. It is the same with a thousand other things. They are now all as if stillborn, for whatever does not have a true inner existence has no life, and cannot be great, and cannot become great.
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, tr. Andrew Shields)
Until we get back to Ponte delle Torri, this photo gallery provides a host of views.
