Italian Backgrounds

by Edith Wharton

Book Overview

Complete and unabridged paperback edition. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880011858
• ISBN13: 9780880011853
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 214 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Thoughtful, Fascinating Travels Essays - Italy, 1901-1904

Italian Backgrounds is comprised of nine, loosely coupled travel essays written by Edith Wharton over a four year period (1901-1904). Few readers are likely to possess her remarkable knowledge of Italian paintings, murals, frescoes, sculpture, and architecture, and in the hands of a lesser writer, these essays might easily have become tedious and overly detailed. Wharton's essays achieve a singular balance between scholarly analysis and captivating memoir. Italian Backgrounds begins not in Italy, but at a small alpine posting-inn in Switzerland close to the Italian border. She contrasts a picturesque "toy chalet, with its air of self-conscious neatness" with the untidiness of nearby Italian villages. Despite this negative comparison, with little effort Wharton convinces us that we must take the dusty, windy road downward into that land where church steeples become campanili, liberated vines wrap themselves around mulberry trees, and far off across the hot plains domes and spires, painted walls, and sculptured alters await us. Italian Backgrounds is not a conventional travel book. Edith Wharton's discursive essays are not arranged geographically, nor chronologically. The chapters could be read in any sequence with little loss of continuity. They might compare favorably with an extensive mural, one that draws your attention first here, then there, then elsewhere. Despite the passage of 100 years, Italian Backgrounds should be mandatory reading to anyone planning to visit Italy, especially those with aspirations to write travel essays. Likewise, Italian Backgrounds would be ideal supplementary reading for a general art appreciation class, as well as targeted reading for art and history majors. The chapters are titled An Alpine Posting-Inn, A Midsummer Week's Dream, The Sanctuaries of the Pennine Alps, What the Hermits Saw, A Tuscan Shrine, Sub Umbra Liliorum, March in Italy, Picturesque Milan, and Italian Backgrounds. Ecco Travels specializes in re-publishing rare and hard-to-obtain travel writings by exceptional authors like Henry James, Charles Dickens, Andre Gide, Freya Stark, Augustus Hare, Aldous Huxley, V. S. Pritchett, Evelyn Waugh, and Edith Wharton.