Goethe’s 277th Birthday

Today Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would have turned 277. Celebrate his birthday with us at the Casa di Goethe!

Free admission all day

5.00 p.m. Guided tour of the collection with Claudia Nordhoff, Research Associate at the Casa di Goethe

6.00 p.m. Birthday toast with homemade lemonade

Goethe spent only one birthday in Rome: his 38th, on 28 August 1787. Rather than celebrating, he devoted the day to his scientific studies, especially botany. In a letter to Johann Gottfried Herder, he wrote enthusiastically that he believed he had come very close to uncovering the “secret of the organisation” of plants – a decisive step towards his idea of the Urpflanze, the primordial plant.

While he spent the day quietly in Rome, his friends gathered in the garden house in Weimar and raised a toast to his health. Friedrich Schiller later wrote to his friend Christian Gottfried Körner with characteristic wit: “We ate heartily and drank Rhine wine to Goethe’s health.”

277 years after Goethe’s birth, we invite you to commemorate the occasion in the very place where he spent his only birthday in Rome. Join us at the Casa di Goethe for guided tours of the collection, where you can discover traces of his Italian Journey, his scientific interests, and evidence of his search for the Urpflanze.

Afterwards, we will raise a glass to Goethe with a refreshing lemonade, inspired by the famous opening lines of Mignon: “Know’st thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?”

Generated using Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT)