The following chapters have been selected from past works of mine, and not without care. Some of them date back as far as 1877. Here and there, of course, they will be found to have been made a little more intelligible, but above all, more brief. Read consecutively, they can leave no one in any doubt, either concerning myself, or concerning Wagner: we are antipodes. The reader will come to other conclusions, too, in his perusal of these pages: for instance, that this is an essay for psychologists and not for Germans.… I have my readers everywhere, in Vienna, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, and New York—but I have none in Europe's Flat-land—Germany.… And I might even have something to say to Italians whom I love just as much as I … Quousque tandem, Crispi … Triple alliance: a people can only conclude a mÉsalliance with the “Empire.”…

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Turin, Christmas 1888.