In 1828 the painter and physician, Carl Gustav Carus, accompanied Prince Friedrich August of Saxony to Italy. In his travel diary he described their arrival in Naples. He had been anticipating his quarters in the Casino Reale on the Via Chiatamone with mounting excitement: “At last I enter, and in front me lie Vesuvius, the sea, the castle, and the blue distance.” Deeply impressed, he painted this view from his room of the harbor and the Castel dell’Ovo. The immediacy of the experience is intermingled with Romantic symbolism in the ambivalence of the external and internal world.
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