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Italy and Imagination - journeys through the literary landscape

© Sonia Michaels

Recently, I undertook the Herculean task of going through my home library, trying to clear out a few unwanted titles to make room on the shelves for new books. I didn't find a lot that I could bear to part with - I rarely do - but I did rediscover a number of much-loved books, and I managed to get sidetracked into re-reading many of them. I also discovered that a lot of these books, some of which I acquired many years ago, contain wonderful scenes set in Mediterranean countries. Anyway, for those people who like to read novels and/or history as well as guidebooks before they travel, or as armchair travellers, here are a few bits and pieces gleaned from three of my favorite books containing scenes or sections set in Italy. Coincidentally, all the books mentioned below are also available in wonderful film versions that are, for a change, equally as good as the novels that inspired them.

In 1981, the wonderful miniseries Brideshead Revisited was shown for the first time. I remember falling hopelessly in love with the series - and its stars - and getting the book as a gift from my father when I passed my driving test! While most of Evelyn Waugh's novel is set in England, there are some wonderful scenes that take place in Venice, where the young Sebastian Flyte takes Charles Ryder to visit Sebastian's father. Here, Charles describes the journey, by a route that many people still choose to take today, though it is now almost certainly a more comfortable trip! It's also interesting to note the character's casual cultural stereotyping of the places and people he encounters on this trip, made sometime in the 1920s.

And so we went; first by the long, cheap sea-crossing to Dunkirk, sitting all night on deck under a clear sky, watching the grey dawn break over the sand dunes; then to Paris, on wooden seats . . . then in the warm, dusty evening to the Gare de Lyon, to the slow train south, again the wooden seats, a carriage full of the poor, visiting their families . . . . We slept fitfully, jolting and stopping, changed once in the night, slept again and awoke in an empty carriage, with pine woods passing the windows and the distant view of mountain peaks. New uniforms at the frontier, coffee and bread at the station buffet, people round us of Southern grace and gaiety; on again into the plains, conifers changing to vine and olive, a change of trains at Milan; garlic sausage, bread, and a flask of Orvieto bought from a trolley. . . the sun mounted high and the country glowed with heat; the carriage filled with peasants, ebbing and flowing at each station,

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