Destination: Italy

LONELY PLANET'S OFFICIAL GUIDEBOOK INFORMATION

Travel Literature

Reams have been written on Italy and it seems like everyone’s been at it, from DH Lawrence to Hermann Hesse, from Charles Dickens to Henry James. Much has also been penned in more recent times giving lucid insight into all aspects of the country. A burgeoning genre is the wide-eyed-foreigner-who-went-to-live-in-Tuscany-and-encountered-many-endearing-problems-but-loved-it-all model. And in response is the what-it’s-really-like-living-in-rural-Italy mode (these books are rarely set in cities).

A Season with Verona (Tim Parks) - Author of several books on Italy, Parks looks under the country’s skin through the prism of Verona’s second-rate football team.

A Small Place in Italy (Eric Newby) - Long before it became habitual for Anglo-Saxon escapists to settle in Tuscany, one of the grand travel scribblers was there resurrecting a tumbledown farmhouse in the 1960s.

The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed (Mary McCarthy) - With deceptive ease and flowing prose, McCarthy opens up all sorts of views on these two città d’arte (cities of art).

Heel to Toe: Encounter in the South of Italy (Charles Lister) - Lister explores the glory and sadness of the south in his trip aboard a clapped-out moped.

Rambling on the Road to Rome (Peter Francis Browne) - The author follows, on foot, the road taken a century ago by Hilaire Belloc from Toul in France to Rome and recounted in Belloc’s classic A Path to Rome.

Too Much Tuscan Sun (Dario Castagno) - Had enough of the home-in-Tuscany hype? Pick up this Chianti guide’s humorous account of trailing around with oddball tourists in Castagno’s beloved home turf.

Vanilla Beans & Brodo – Real Life in the Hills of Tuscany (Isabella Dusi) - Dusi recounts in great colour life in the Tuscan wine town of Montalcino, her adopted home.

Venice (James Morris) - Before he became Jan, Morris wrote this delicious personal ode to the lagoon city, treating with equal dexterity Venice’s distant glorious past and troubled present.

Travelling to Italy?
Lonely Planet recommends World Nomads Travel insurance