4
“I Became Desirous... of Seeing
Foreign Parts, Especially Italy”
1638–1639
Milton traveled on the Continent, by his own imprecise reckoning, for “a year and
three months, more or less” – that is, from late April or early May, 1638 to late July
or early August, 1639.^1 He was taking the grand tour some years later than was
usual for privileged young gentlemen, and not simply to acquire a veneer of cul-
ture. By his years of study he was prepared for the experience as few others can have
been. He had the classical tradition in his bones. He could speak French and Italian
well. He had read Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso and other texts in the vernacular.
And he was already a neo-Latin poet of great distinction, if as yet little reputation.
These travels provided an important catalyst for Milton’s personal growth. He
left home permanently. He left rural Horton for cosmopolitan Europe. He left the
isolation of solitary study for the attractive social and intellectual life of the Italian
academies. He met first-hand the diverse faces of Roman Catholicism in France
and in several parts of Italy. He left a culture deeply marked by iconoclasm to
encounter the full glory of Renaissance and Baroque painting and sculpture and
architecture. He had opportunities to hear the new music of Monteverdi and oth-
ers. He met and had cordial conversation with some of the great men of the era:
Hugo Grotius, Galileo, Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Perhaps most important, thanks
to his letters of introduction but even more to his own evident intellectual distinc-
tion and poetic talent, he was welcomed by the literati throughout Italy as one of
their own. One consequence of all this was a great boost of self-confidence in the
rightness of his chosen vocation as poet. Another, despite his deep love for Italy and
his Italian friends, was a reaffirmation of his own Englishness and of English Protes-
tant culture.
Milton’s account in the Defensio Secunda is the only source for the general outline
of his travels,^2 with some additions from his other prose tracts, a few Italian records,
and some letters and poems exchanged with Italian friends. That account, however,
was not intended as autobiography but as rhetoric, designed to emphasize his ster-