A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view. The novel can be seen as an epilogue to the possibly unfinished work "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", and also as an answer to Tobias Smollett's decidedly unsentimental "Travels Through France and Italy". Sterne had met Smollett during his
John Hall-Stevenson and Devonshire" (1763), "A Pastoral Puke; a second Sermon preached before the people called Whigs; by an Independent" (1764), "Makarony Fables, with the new Fable of the Bees" (1767), "Lyric Consolations, with the Speech of Alderman Wilkes delivered in a Dream" (1768) and "An Essay upon the King's Friends" (1776). Hall-Stevenson gave some financial support to his friend Sterne, who often visited him at Skelton, and they liked to race chariots over the sands at Saltburn, and Hall-Stevenson appears under the name of "Eugenius" in Sterne's novels "Tristram Shandy" and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". This was unfinished