Palermo and Valletta from the Sea

The artwork

Top, on the flank of Monte Pellegrino above Palermo, a zigzag road climbs the slope: it is the pilgrims' way to the grotto of Saint Rosalia, and Goethe walked it fourteen years before this print. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, in a handmade frame.

• Palermo below Monte Pellegrino and the harbour of Valletta, hand-coloured.
• Beside a bookcase or in a dining room it brings the Mediterranean home.
• A gift for anyone from Palermo or who misses Malta.

Goethe reached Palermo by sea on 2 April 1787, and the next day he called Monte Pellegrino “the most beautiful headland in the world”. The painter Christoph Heinrich Kniep, his travelling companion, let him go walking alone so that he could draw its exact outline: one of his drawings of Palermo with the mountain, dated 1787, is now in the Goethe-Museum in Frankfurt. On 6 April Goethe climbed to the sanctuary by a road built, he wrote, on piers and arches like an aqueduct. In the grotto a priest asked him whether he was from Genoa and wished to have some masses said; he stayed to listen to vespers until nightfall.

It is a hand-coloured aquatint from The Little Sea Torch, which John Thomas Serres published in London in 1801; the idea came to him aboard the warship Clyde, when her commander, Charles Cunningham, put a French pilots' manual into his hands. Below is the harbour of Malta with Valletta: written on the water, in Italian, is “Porto di Gallere”, and on the fort in the foreground at right flies the British flag, then a novelty: the French had surrendered to the British on 4 September 1800. The copy it comes from is in the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Beside a bookcase or in a dining room, it is a gift for anyone from Palermo or anyone who misses Malta. And on Monte Pellegrino the zigzag road is still climbing, for anyone who fancies retracing Goethe's walk.

Unique quality material

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 29 x 42 cm (11.4 x 16.5 in)
With frame: 31 x 44 cm (12.2 x 17.3 in)
Material: artwork printed on very fine handmade Amalfi paper with deckled edges
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass