With a few significant exceptions, this diary,18 like his previous travel diary, bristles with facts, mostly topical. Travel guides and statistics were not so conveniently published then as now, hence Swedenborg recorded these things for himself—like most diary-keepers not considering what people in the future would like to have had him write about.
His journeys took him over the ground dreamed of by all dwellers in the dark winters of the poor, limited North. On July 10, 1736, he left Stockholm, going through Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels to Paris, where he arrived September 3. There he remained for a year and a half, leaving on March 12, 1738, for Italy. Dangerously "swimming in snow" over Mont Cenis (or Mont Sini, as he had it, spelling most foreign names by ear) he arrived in Turin and went over Milan and Padua to Venice. He stayed there nearly four months. From Florence, to which he gave a fortnight, he went to Rome, arriving September 25, 1738. He was in Rome nearly five months. He left Italy from Genoa on March 17, 1739, returning to Paris and then going to Amsterdam, where he finished and saw through the press the work for the sake of which the journeys had been undertaken.
At the beginning of each new set of impressions the diary could compete with any guidebook; later on it dwindled and sank under the crowding experiences, yet it is a valuable document through which to look at Swedenborg.
While there was still an engineer in him who noted the new dock being built in Copenhagen and most of the military fortifications he saw en route, he was not much concerned now with manufactures or even with mining. He was not a worldly man certainly but a man of the great world, and one of the most tirelessly sight-seeing, extrovert type. Though he had been out of his country before, he had never before had time or money enough. Now he saw everything along his way—museums, churches, castles, parks, libraries. He grumbled again at the lack of "new books." Except for Bibles, old codexes did not interest him, nor "old-fashioned" architecture either, except when it was old enough, such as the classic.
His energy was fantastic. One day in Paris gives a sample: "I went through Luxembourg and the rue d'Enfer to the Observatory, then to the Porte St. Jacques, past the Capucin monastery, past the Val
