The chronology of Nietzsche's travels during the year 1888 is as simple as that of previous years. He stayed in Nice until the 2nd April, when he left for Turin, arriving on the 5th and remaining in the city until the 5th June. He was delighted with it and decided it would be ‘my Residenz from now on'. For the summer he went to Sils-Maria and stayed there until the 20th September, when he returned to Turin. Apart from a relapse in the middle of the summer, he was feeling his health had improved; his spirits were lighter, and he experienced a joy in working which exceeded anything he had known before. Had his 'medical knowledge’ been what he claimed, he might have recognized the symptoms and perhaps, even at this late stage, done something to prevent or retard the ultimate consequences: but he did nothing and, in all probability, failed to realize there was anything to be done. He accepted his ‘recovery’ at its face value, whereas it was only the deceptive prelude to total collapse: when he left Turin on the 9th January 1889 he was incurably insane—'a ruin that only a friend could recognise'.

His decline into insanity took the form of an increasingly intense feeling of euphoria culminating at last in megalomania. As early as February his letters reveal that the overcompensation of previous years was beginning to assume a somewhat heightened colouring: writing to Seydlitz on the 12th, for instance, he says:

By May he was experiencing a sensation of well-being which sent him into cries of rapture: ‘Wonder upon wonders,’ he wrote to Seydlitz on the 13th, ‘I have had a notably cheerful spring up to now.