A travel book very much like its savory subject: ripe and
emotional, a feast of scenery and tastes and opinions. Harrison,
author of Visions of Glory - an expose of the Jehovah's Witnesses
cult - and Off Center, has a reputation for conducting startling
interviews where the subject is cornered into revealing
uncomfortable truths. This travel diary across the Italian
peninsula has the same confessional quality, with the spotlight
this time turned upon herself. Calling her trip a "journey of
reconciliation," Harrison seeks to make peace with her memories of
an unhappy divorce, middle-age, religion, and to perhaps
reestablish connections with long-separated family members; the
book is part spiritual pilgrimage, and Italy becomes the place for
healing. Personal angst aside, Harrison also knows how to inform
the reader about what she loves and abhors in Milan, Venice,
Florence, Rome, and more unfamiliar places like Puglia and
Calabria. Her observations are both recondite and gossipy, a
many-layered commentary textured with a sense of history, folklore,
food, fashion, architecture, literature, and politics. Each place
she investigates develops its own personality to be embraced or
ultimately rejected - like Venice, that "mirror of water," which at
first fascinates in its "watery emancipations," but soon becomes
overly theatrical and decadent. Harrison's favorite place? Rome,
the city where "the art of living" is realized at its highest
levels, "where after six months one wishes never to leave it." A
good travel companion, enhancing even imaginary trips to that
golden land. (Kirkus Reviews)
Italian Days is one of the richest and most absorbing travel books
ever written"a journey down the Italian peninsula that immerses us
in the inexhaustible plenty of that culture and the equally
bountiful intelligence and sensibility of its author. Barbara
Grizzuti Harrison, noted essayist, journalist, and fiction writer,
brings us a fascinating mixture of history, politics, folklore,
food, architecture, arts, and literature, studded with local
anecdotes and personal reflections. From modern, fashionable Milan;
to beautiful, historic Rome with its modern traffic and, even
today, its sudden displays of faith; to primitive, brooding
Calabria, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison reveals in all its glory and
confusion her Italy, the country of her origins, where the keys to
her past are held by those who never left. Beautifully and
eloquently rendered, Italian Days is a deeply engaging travelogue,
but it is much more as well. It is the story of a return home"of
friends, family, and faith"and of the search for the good life that
propels all of us on our journeys wherever we are.
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