The papers brought together in this volume stem from a German-Italian colloquium held in September 1994 and concentrate a) on the Arcadian image of Italy and its perception by German travelers to Italy, and b) on the presence of Italy in Weimar around 1800. The studies refer to a broad range of different literary genres - travel literature, elegy, epigram, novel, artist biography, drama - and extend their purview to embrace biography and autobiography alongside fictional texts. In so doing they are able to document the material, historical and intellectual foundations upon which the highly detailed image of Italy in Goethe's Weimar was based.