"Der Wanderer in Italien" (1818): Heinroth's View About Italy

Johann Christian August Heinroth was the first doctor in Europe to hold a chair of Psychiatry and constantly wrote substantial medical-scientific papers. Under the pseudonym of Treumund Wellentreter, he also published the ‘Gesammelte Blätter’. The ‘Blätter’, result of a work of the ‘poetic psychiatrist’, as Peter Kaiser put it, includes fifteen hundred pages of lyrical, epic and dramatic ‘revelations’ which betray the author’s feeling for the ‘romantic horizon’ and give tangible proof of his piety. ‘Der Wanderer in Italien. Epigrammatisch-elegisch’, published within the first volume of the ‘Blätter’, is Heinroth’s work about Italy. This present work intends to examine this text, to point out how Heinroth uses Italy to recount his youthful Wanderung and how, in the unusual contact with Italian Nature and Art, the author consolidates its bond with God and his homeland