He entered Italy from the Tyrol, and the first important town at which he stopped was Verona. From Verona he went to Vicenza, and so, through Padua, to Venice. At Venice he remained three weeks, allowing its splendours to impress themselves deeply on his imagination. He then went to Bologna, which he ever afterwards associated with the charm of Raphael’s St. Agatha. In his thoughts about Italy it had always been Rome of which he had chiefly dreamed, and now his longing to be there became so overwhelming that he hurried over what remained of the journey, staying only three hours at Florence. In view of the joy that was to come he was scarcely conscious of the inconveniences of travel. “If I am dragged to Rome on Ixion’s wheel,” he wrote, “I will not complain.” On October 29, 1786, he drove into Rome through the Porta del Popolo. “Yes,” he wrote a day or two afterwards, “I have at last arrived at the capital of the world!... All the dreams of my youth are now realized. The first engravings I remember--my father had hung the views of Rome in an entrance-hall--I see now in reality, and all the things I have long known from paintings and drawings, from copper-plates and wood-cuts, from plaster casts and cork models, stand together before me. Wherever I go, I find an acquaintance in a new world; it is all as I had conceived it, and all new. The like I may say of my observations, of my ideas. I have had no new thoughts, have found nothing quite strange, but the old thoughts have been so defined, they have become so thoroughly alive, they have been brought into such harmonious relation to one another, that they may pass for new. When Pygmalion’s Elise, whom he had formed absolutely in accordance with his wishes, and to whom he had given as much truth and reality as were within the scope of art, at last came to him, and said, ‘It is I,’ how different was the living woman from the sculptured stone!”