New Italian Sketches

In the dying light of the nineteenth century, John Addington Symonds undertook a pilgrimage through Italy that was as much internal as geographical. New Italian Sketches records not merely the physical passage from the frost-bitten Alps to the sun-drenched south, but a soul's awakening to the particular beauty that only Italian light, Italian ruins, and Italian silence can provoke. Symonds writes with the cultivated sensibility of the aesthetic movement: every mountain meadow, crumbling campanile, and forgotten chapel becomes an occasion for sustained meditation on what it means to be moved by landscape. His prose carries the Victorian traveler's peculiar longing, that bittersweet awareness that beauty observed is beauty already departing. These are essays for readers who understand that the true destination of any journey is the altered consciousness that return renders impossible to forget.