“We are all pilgrims who seek Italy”: Goethe, Dante, and the Eternal City

This talk considers how European visitors, in the era of the Grand Tour, engaged with Italian poetry and art to transform the traditional religious experience of pilgrimage into a secular, culturally motivated, intellectual journey.  At the same time, the talk explores how the memoirs and travel diaries of these “tourists” gradually become the new guides to a Rome that is both real and imagined.

Mary Watt is a Professor of Italian Studies, and Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, University of Florida. Mary holds a Ph.D. in Italian Studies and a J.D., both from the University of Toronto, Canada.  Her work has been supported by the Rothman Endowment for the Humanities, the Municipality of Ravenna, and the Norwegian Institute in Rome. She is the author of over fifty journal articles, book chapters, reviews and translations and currently serves as a review editor for Speculum.  She is the author of The Cross that Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy, Dante; Columbus and the Prophetic Tradition: Spiritual Imperialism in the Italian Imagination and Dante’s Golden Legend – Auto-Hagiography in the Divine Comedy.

To attend this lecture, please register at this link.  You will receive a confirmation email one day before the event containing information about joining the lecture.

All times stated in Eastern time.