An afternoon with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his house on Frauenplan in Weimar - January 1827

It was the smell that reached me first. Not the smell of a museum, not that stale reverence that clings to old houses when they are opened to visitors—but something vibrant: beeswax and ink, a hint of minerals from the natural history collection in the next room, and beneath it, barely perceptible, the scent of Italian lemons, which lay in a bowl on the windowsill, as if to prove that the south was not entirely lost, even in Thuringia.