Traveling in Italy with Henry James

the long version

Henry James was not only a great Victorian novelist. He was also one of the great travel writers of all time. Traveling in Italy with Henry James combines his vivid letters home from Italy with a selection of his most heartfelt and eloquent essays about the cities and rural areas he visited between 1869 and 1907. First arriving in Italy a year before it was united as a secular state, James was a firsthand observer of Italy's national adolescence and early adulthood. His letters bear witness to his spontaneous responses to the dramatic geography and the extroverted people, which were a refreshing contrast to the rainy climate and reserved Victorians he was accustomed to. In the essays James delves more deeply into his Italian experience. Unlike other collections of Henry James's Italian travel writing, Kaplan's anthology has been arranged geographically: He compiles for readers and tourists a literary map of James's Italy. This small, portable volume is the ideal companion for any explorer of Italy, and for the armchair tourist, Kaplan's collection provides a city-by-city tour of Florence, Venice, Rome, and the breathtaking countryside in between. In James's prose writings on Italy, readers will find the sensuous, passionate, human side of one of the most inspired writers in the English language.