ABSTRACT
On 2 September 1901, Sigmund Freud fulfilled a long-frustrated dream of visiting Rome, a city whose cultural and religious significance had weighed on the clinical psychologist’s mind for many years.2 The impact of the Urbs Aeterna was as instantaneous as it was enervating: within an hour of arriving on the overnight train from Castello, Freud had bathed and written home that he felt a “proper Roman.”3 For the next twelve days he devoted himself to St. Peter’s, the Vatican Museum, and the Museo Nazionale, where he encountered Michelangelo’s statue of Moses for the first time. Freud marveled at the Pantheon, exclaiming “so this is what I have been afraid of for so many years!”4 And he roamed the rolling Alban hills before reveling, finally, in the Palatine, his favorite corner of the city. On 14 September, Freud departed Rome with a heavy heart for his home in Vienna. The consummation of the desire to go to Rome had been of the highest emotional significance; indeed, as he later recalled, it was the “high point of my life […] I could have worshipped the abased and mutilated remnant of the Temple of Minerva near the forum of Nerva.”5
