Caminhando em solo clássico – Karl Philipp Moritz em Roma: literatura e imaginação histórica

Abstract

In this article we address aspects of the thought and historical sensibility of Karl Philipp Moritz. Having it in mind, we take as a guideline the topos of the “classical ground” emphasized by Moritz in the book A Journey of a German to Italy from 1786 to 1788: a travel diary in letters (Reisen eines Deutschen in Italien in den Jahren 1786 bis 1788 : Reisebericht in Briefen). In the context of the formative trips to Italy undertaken in the 1780’s by German intellectuals and poets, the term “classical ground” (klassische Boden) denotes a relationship that Moritz – as well as Goethe, Herder and other authors of travel narratives of that age – establishes between the literary imagination and the places in which the events portrayed by the ancient literature took place. According to Moritz, the experience of reading an ancient author (or remembering this reading) in the place where the facts portrayed would have occurred would be able to activate, through “imagination”, the historical memory, giving to the past a living presence. By evoking the experience of the “classical ground”, Moritz establishes a dialectic between imagination and place, literature and landscape, language and “ground”. He notes that in modern Rome the ancient persists imbricated with the modern, whether in the landscape (which includes the architecture, monuments, ruins, the urban layout of the city, and the Italian nature), or in the Roman “people” (in their linguistic and cultural habits, political and religious ceremonies and institutions). It is important for him, finally, to think to what extent, starting from these living remains, the Antiquity could be (re)visited and purified from its imbrications with the modern.