Twilight in Italy

D. H. Lawrence arrived in Italy in 1912 fleeing the suffocating respectability of Edwardian England, and what he found there transformed him. This lyrical travel narrative captures his wanderings through the Italian lakes, mountains, and villages at a moment before the Great War remade everything. Lawrence is not interested in tourism. He is hunting for something his industrialized homeland had crushed: the primal connection between body and spirit, between human life and the ancient rhythms of earth and sun. He writes of Italian peasants with an intensity that is both affectionate and unsettling, sensing in them a vitality that feels almost dangerous. The book opens in the Bavarian highlands, among crucifixes that blend beauty with sorrow, and then moves southward into a landscape where sensuality and spirituality have not yet been torn apart. Lawrence's prose here is gorgeous and strange, full of acute observations about food, death, sexuality, and the strange way a place can seem to inhabit a person. This is Lawrence at his most personal, less the controversial novelist than a philosopher of the body, searching for a way to live that modernity had made impossible.