Tuscany in Mind

Informationen zum Autor Alice Leccese Powers Klappentext In her fourth literary travel companion, Alice Leccese Powers explores one of the most seductive regions of the world through more than two centuries of fiction, poetry, essays, letters, and memoirs by English-speaking visitors to northern Italy. The poet Shelley called Tuscany "a paradise of exiles”; it has long been a magnet for literary travelers and expatriates. Here are writers who have made their home in Tuscan villas, castles, and farmhouses, from the Shelleys, Byron, and the Brownings to Frances Mayes. Here too are Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and E. M. Forster on the glories of Florence, Pisa's leaning tower, and the enchanting Tuscan countryside, alongside the tart wit of Mark Twain, Mary McCarthy, and Erica Jong. From James Boswell's record of his romantic dalliances to Laura Fraser's memoir An Italian Affair to Sarah Dunant's novel The Birth of Venus, Tuscany in Mind assembles a glittering mosaic portrait of an unforgettable place. Kinta Beevor • James Boswell • Elizabeth Barrett Browning • Robert Browning • Lord Byron • Bruce Chatwin • Ann Cornelisen • Charles Dickens • Sarah Dunant • Lawrence Ferlinghetti • Penelope Fitzgerald • E. M. Forster • Laura Fraser • Paul Gervais • Barbara Grizzuti Harrison • Robert Hellenga • William Dean Howells • Henry James • Erica Jong • D. H. Lawrence • David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell • Robert Lowell • Frances Mayes • Mary McCarthy • H. V. Morton • Eric Newby • Iris Origo • John Ormond • Elizabeth Romer • John Ruskin • Mary Shelley • Percy Bysshe Shelley • Kate Simon • Tobias Smollett • Matthew Spender • Stephen Spender • Mark Twain • Edith Wharton Kinta Beevor (1911-1995) In 1916 when British-born Kinta Beevor was five, her father, the painter Aubrey Waterfield, bought a sixteenth-century castle, La Fortezza della Brunella, near the village of Aulla. Waterfield, his wife, the writer Lina Duff Gordon, and their three children moved into the imposing fortress with its improbable rooftop garden that looked like "it had been abandoned under an enchanter's spell." For the next twenty-five years they lived a bohemian life, punctuated by visits from friends like Aldous Huxley, Bernard Berenson, D. H. Lawrence, and Iris Origo. Kinta and her brothers were often left to the care of Aullan servants while her parents devoted themselves to their work and the rehabilitation of Fortezza della Brunella. Beevor wrote, "It was often said of my parents that they had all of the luxuries of life, but none of the necessities . . . they seldom had money for those things that their relations considered the basis of civilized life." Their lives in Tuscany ended with World War II. Beevor's parents had a harrowing escape from Italy and relocated, unhappily, in England. Her two brothers and her husband served with the British military; her brother John was killed in combat. Aubrey Waterfield died in 1944. But the indomitable Lina Duff Gordon returned to the heavily damaged Fortezza after the war. The destruction of her husband's frescoes and the memories evoked by his rooftop garden proved too much for her and, after several years, she returned to England. Kinta Beevor's only book, A Tuscan Childhood, from which this is excerpted, was published in 1993, two years before her death. She concluded that La Fortezza was "the most beautiful and magical place in the world. But when I look back, I can easily see why friends and relatives . . . considered my parents wildly imprudent, if not mad, to settle in such a place. Thank God for imprudence." from A TUSCAN CHILDHOOD In those days, just after the First World War, the kitchen was the best place in which to get to know the region. And the herbs and vegetables, still smelling of the warm volcanic earth, could start a love of Tuscan cooking that would last a lifetime. For the servants, as well as their friends and r...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Alice Leccese Powers
• Con la collaborazione di: Alice Leccese Powers (Editore)
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 17.05.2005
• EAN: 9781400076758
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7675-8
• Pagine: 400
• Dimensioni: 130 mm x 205 mm x 25 mm
• Serie: Vintage Departures; Vintage Departures
• Categoria: Viaggi > Reportage di viaggio, racconti di viaggio