Italian Backgrounds (Ecco Travels)

Rating:
Summary: She knows her Italy!
Review: "Italian Backgrounds" by Edith Wharton is a somewhat charming travel book (a quick read) about her time in Italy as its veteran traveler. The piece is not written in a narrative, but is rather more thematically arranged. Wharton doesn't write about the Doges Palace or the Duomo, her milieu is the deeper background of the dedicated traveler.

The title comes from her theme derived from an analogy that traveling in Italy involves various areas of a painting. Italian paintings, she writes, have fore- middle- and backgrounds. The two-or three-day tourist in Venice spends all his or her time in the foreground, traipsing the well-established routes and keeping to the guidebooks. If one has more time, one can go farther into the "painting" by discovering more, and, of course, finally, as Wharton herself has done, one can dwell in the backgrounds, knowing the country well, understanding all its eras and its different brands of beauty.

Wharton is a harsh art critic, and much of the book deals with her assessments of lesser known (to me as the foreground tourist of Italy) artists and their works. My favorite chapter retold the story of her identifying some mislabeled statuary in Tuscany as belonging to a different artist and era altogether.

It was pleasant to read. For me, I am a fan of Wharton, so enjoyed this look into her experiences and the life of her mind.

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful, Fascinating Travels Essays - Italy, 1901-1904
Review: 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, perhaps, 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.