Joseph Collins wrote this book in 1910, before the Great War reshaped Europe, and his affection for Italy feels almost innocent in hindsight: a romantic's guide to a civilization he feared America was too busy to appreciate. These essays trace Italian literature from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, pausing at Petrarch and Boccaccio, then moving through the Romantic crisis and the desperate hope of the Risorgimento. But Collins is not merely cataloguing names and dates. He believes that to truly know a people, you must read their books, and he writes as someone who has found in Italian literature a warmth, an intensity, a closeness to life that he fears modern Anglophone culture is losing. The title is perfectly chosen: idling, not rushing, not conquering, but lingering in a foreign language and landscape until it becomes familiar, until the reader too feels that profound emotional connection to a foundational European culture. For anyone who has ever loved Italy, or wanted to, or wondered what the old travelers found there before tourism turned everything into itinerary.
