Through Paris, where Milton was introduced to the famous Hugo Grotius, then ambassador for Sweden at the French court, he moved on rapidly to Italy, by way of Nice. Af ter visiting Genoa, Leghorn and Pisa, he arrived at Florence, in Aug. 1638. Enchanted by the city and its society, he remained there two months, fre quenting the chief academies or literary clubs, and even taking part in their proceedings. It was in the neighbourhood of Florence that he "found and visited" the great Galileo, then old and blind, and still nominally a prisoner to the Inquisition for his astro nomical heresy.
By way of Florence and Siena, he reached Rome some time in October, and spent about another two months there, not only going about among the ruins and antiquities and visiting the galleries, but mixing also, as he had done in Florence, with the learned society of the academies. The most picturesque incident of his stay in Rome was his presence at a great musical enter tainment in the palace of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Here he had not only the honour of a specially kind reception by the cardinal himself, but also, it would appear, the supreme pleasure of listening to the marvellous Leonora Baroni, the most renowned singer of her age.
Late in November he left Rome for Naples. He had hardly been in Naples a month, however, when there came news from England which urged his immediate return home. "The sad news of civil war in England," he says, "called me back; for I considered it base that, while my fellow-countrymen were fight ing at borne for liberty, I should be travelling at my ease for intellectual culture" (Defensio secunda). In Dec. 1638, there fore, he set his face northwards again. His return journey, how ever, probably because he learnt that the news he had first re ceived was exaggerated or premature, was broken into stages. He spent a second January and February (1638/39) in Rome, in some danger, he says, from the papal police, because the English Jesuits in Rome had taken offence at his habit of free speech on the subject of religion. From Rome he went to Florence, where he stayed two months, and in April 1639 he went on, by Bologna and Ferrara, to Venice. About a month was given to Venice ; and thence, having shipped for England the books he had collected in Italy, he went, by Verona and Milan, over the Alps, to Geneva. Here he spent a week or two in June, having daily conversations with the great Protestant theo logian Dr. Jean Diodati, the uncle of his friend Charles Diodati.
From Geneva he returned to Paris, and so to England. He was home again in Aug. 1639, having been absent in all 15 or 16 months.
Milton's Continental tour, and especially the Italian portion of it, which he describes at some length in his Defensio secunda, remained one of the chief pleasures of his memory through all his subsequent life. Nor was it without fruits of a literary kind. Besides two of his Latin Epistolae Familiares, one to the Floren tine grammarian Buommattei, and the other to Lucas Holstenius, there have to be assigned to Milton's 16 months on the Continent his three Latin epigrams Ad Leonoram Romae canentem, his Latin scazons Ad Salsillum poetam romanum aegrotantem, his fine Latin hexameters entitled Mansus, addressed to Giovanni Bat tista Manso, and his five Italian sonnets, with a canzone, in praise of a Bolognese lady.
His bosom friend and companion from boyhood, Charles Dio dati, died in Blackfriars, London, in Aug. 1638, not four months after Milton had gone away on his tour. The intelligence did not reach Milton till some months afterwards, probably not till his second stay in Florence; and, though he must have learnt some of the particulars from his friend's uncle in Geneva, he did not know them fully till his return to England. How pro foundly they affected him appears from his Epitaphium Damonis, then written in memory of his dead friend. The importance of this poem in Milton's biography cannot be overrated. It is per haps the noblest of all his Latin poems; and, though written in the artificial manner of a pastoral, it is unmistakably an outburst of the most passionate personal grief. In this respect Lycidas, artistically perfect though that poem is, cannot be compared with it; and it is only the fact that Lycidas is in English, while the Epitaphium Damonis is in Latin, that has led to the notion that Edward King of Christ's college was peculiarly and pre-emi nently the friend of Milton in his youth and early manhood.
We should not have known, but for an incidental passage in the Epitaphium Damonis (16o-178), that, at the time of his return from Italy, he had chosen a subject for a great poem from the Arthurian legend. This epic was to be in English, and he had resolved that all his poetry for the future should be in the same tongue.