A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Reverend Mr. Yorick travels through France and toward Italy by attending less to monuments than to shifts in feeling, manners, attraction, and self-regard. Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy turns travel into a sequence of intimate tests, each revealing how quickly sympathy can be redirected by mood or desire.

One early encounter begins when a Franciscan monk enters to request help for his convent. Yorick has already put away his purse and resolved not to give him a single sou. Studying the older man's face, however, he starts to question the decision and the unstable impulses behind it. The episode makes generosity neither a fixed virtue nor an abstract lesson; it becomes a performance observed by the person performing it.

The book proceeds through self-contained adventures, many of them amorous, with Yorick serving as Sterne's playful alter ego without collapsing narrator and author into one identity. Its subjective method differed from travel accounts organized around classical learning and impersonal description. Personal taste, moral hesitation, and social gesture supply the itinerary. Published in 1768 and admired for its elegance, the novel helped make sentimental travel writing influential by treating a journey as an instrument for examining the traveler.