Enfilade

I imagine many Enfilade readers will be interested to learn of Maureen Cassidy-Geiger’s transcriptions of the unpublished diaries of Crown Prince Friedrich Christian, documenting his travels in Italy from 1738 to 1740. –CH

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From Cassidy-Geiger’s introduction to the project:

Incognito: The ‘Comte du Lusace’ on the Grand Cure in Italy, 1738–40 — The unpublished travel accounts of Crown Prince Friedrich Christian (1722–63) of Saxony/Poland, a disabled tourist traveling in Italy in 1738–40 as ‘Comte de Lusace’, and related documentation and research by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger.

The Prince and I

Pierre Subleyras, Portrait of Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony, 1739 (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie)

I first met Friedrich Christian, Crown Prince of Saxony/Poland, in 2004 in the State Archives in Dresden. I was gathering material for a book and stumbled across the handwritten travel diaries of his Italian odyssey in 1738–40. Sixteen years old and crippled by scoliosis and what was termed “palsy” (probably cerebral palsy), his Grand Tour was less a gap year than an all-out effort to find a cure for his condition in medicine or religion and safeguard the succession. Crowned Elector in 1763, he died prematurely from smallpox, aged 41, after reigning for 74 days. Thus he ended up a footnote in history books instead of a legend. And in 2004, I adopted him as my subject, hero and muse. . . .

The handwritten journals of his two-year odyssey are the guidebooks for this journey of mine, of his. The prince wrote daily, in school-boy French, in the words of a dutiful and obedient child on the uncertain road to manhood. A Catholic crown prince of a Protestant state held tight by the Jesuits and buttressed by the Bohemian mysticism of the court of Vienna, he sat at the center of an able-bodied swirl, incognito as Comte
de Lusace though hardly anonymous. . . .

A New Map of Italy . . . from Monsr. D’Anville (London, Robert Sayer, 1790)

To date, I have twice driven the historic itinerary and have conducted research in situ in Dresden, Naples, Rome and Venice, towards an annotated publication. For the moment, however, this WordPress blog is an experimental platform for sharing the contemporary accounts with interested colleagues. The transcriptions retain the inaccuracies, idiosyncrasies and misspellings of the originals and await thorough proofreading and corrections; autocorrect has also introduced inadvertent errors, for which I apologize. . . .

The site is available here»