ITALIAN JOURNEY
A SUMMER IN ITALY, by Sean O’Faolain; Eyre and Spottiswoode; London.’ English price, 12/6. ‘THERE are 66 short chapters in this book and every one of them is worth a second reading. It is no. guide book, cluttered with tiresome descriptions of (continued on next page)
(continued from previous page)
churches, monuments and works of art, among which Itali appear as rather static irftidentals against the background of their immense past. This is a living book, the work of a mind stored with the fruits of seasoned reading and reflection. The grain of history is scattered through it with discretion and wit; and references to the war and its aftermath are used only to emphasise a moment or a feature. Politics have no, place in this record of a journey made through Lombardy and Tuscany, as far south as Rome and.across to Venice.. Sean O’Faolain, like so many other — sensitive travellers, never did any of the things he had planned to do, but his quick response to beauty directed his footsteps, leading him to places and incidents the guide books never find or encounter. Although devoutly religious, O’Faolain. could and would not accept
many of the apocryphal stories about relics and churches; he does not write in a nostalgic way about the past, though he is acutely sensitive to its legacy of beauty and magnificence. He writes with warmth.
understanding and wit of the people he meets at the races, a wine fair, a funeral, in trains and pubs (he even refers to "pubs" in Venice), and he carries on the most delightful canversations with his own "devil" about "Art and hd, and "Art and Reality." He prefers the living to the inanimate, and on his tour through Turin, Genoa, Florence, Verona and Siena he never remarks on the obvious, whether he is discussing a landscape, a tower, a bridge, a thunderstorm, Tintoretto, a glass of wine or Ruskin. This is a book one longs to quote. One of his reflections, at the end of a day when the beauty of Italy had almost exhausted him, most aptly describes its quality: "I think that what we remember is not half so important as what we half forget, for these are the moments that sink into our deepest being. Those lost idle hours of those lost idle days are what I ache for when I take up again the rotted net of memory, crumbled by
the narcotic sun."
O.A.
G.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 14
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411ITALIAN JOURNEY New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 14
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