Stories of Southern Italy

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This dazzling hardcover collection brings to life the magnificent southern regions of Italy, from Naples to Sicily, as seen through the eyes of literary greats from Ovid and Virgil to Italo Calvino and Elsa Morante.Southern Italy has long inspired one of the most vigorous literary traditions in Europe. Visitors since antiquity have sought to capture the nature of this enigmatic place, which has been marked both by centuries of hardship and foreign occupation (by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and Muslims among others) and by its extraordinary natural beauty and cultural riches. In this collection of short fiction, the perspectives of such notable visitors as Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, and D. H. Lawrence sit alongside those of some of Italy's finest writers, including Luigi Pirandello, Tomasi di Lampedusa, Elsa Morante, Anna Maria Ortese, and Nicola Pugliese. Woven through these tales are the individual histories and mythologies of Naples, Sicily, Calabria, Catania, Abruzzo, and Basilicata. The classical poets Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid map out a Sicily populated by Cyclopes and sea monsters, in The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, Vincenzo Consolo depicts an island on the frontier of Italian unification, Curzio Malaparte and Norman Lewis immortalize the wreckage of Naples and the indomitable spirit of its people in the final months of World War II, and the South's legacy of brigandage and organised crime enliven the stories of Leonardo Sciascia and Carlo Levi. Collectively, these entertaining tales provide a portal into a fascinating place in all its drama and beauty.