Diario del viaje a Italia

In the year 1580, immediately after the first edition of the Essays was published in Bordeaux, Montaigne left his castle and traveled for a whole year through Germany and Switzerland until he reached Italy. Two hundred years before Goethe, the author attributed to his predecessor grand tour a determining role in his personal training: it allowed him to expand his knowledge of Latin and Italian, and it gave him the opportunity to discover places and customs that he only knew through literature. But the manuscript of his Diary of the Voyage to Italy was only discovered and published in the 1770s before being lost during the French Revolution. This new annotated edition by Jordi Bayod recovers a unique document that is not only an unavoidable appendix to Los Essays due to the variety of topics it addresses and the seemingly whimsical digressive character with which it intersperses, but an extraordinary precedent of travel literature and a manifesto of cosmopolitanism.