A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby

A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby lands on the shelves of my shop.

HarperCollins, 1994, Hardback in dust wrapper.

From the cover: In 1967, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda fulfilled a long-cherished ambition when they acquired I Castagni (otherwise The Chestnuts), a small and excessively ruined farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the borders of Liguria and northern Tuscany. They were the first foreigners to live in the area, and twenty-five years later they remained the only ones.

The house came with a tileless roof, a long-abandoned septic tank and a lavatory hidden in a dense plantation of canes in the open air. It also contained a wealth of indigenous wildlife: a large colony of cockroaches; a hornets nest; an adder which shed its skin every year on a beam in the owners bedroom; predatory mice the size of small cats who used red flannel from Eric Newbys favourite shirts to line their offsprings nests; and, not least, a sitting tenant, Attilio a minute, eccentric and very ancient man who had once built an aeroplane in which he had launched himself from a high place and crashed, hurting himself badly.

In this affectionate, humorous, often hilarious book, Eric Newby recounts how he and Wanda, who met in Italy in 1943 after he escaped from a POW camp, pulled I Castagni from the brink of collapse with the aid of the local esperti (skilled workmen). It describes their long-enduring friendship with the neighbouring contadini, who welcomed them whether eating, drinking, harvesting grapes and olives, or hunting for fungus and wild asparagus from the moment they arrived.

In Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby described the start of his love affair with Italy; in A Small Place in Italy, with his inimitable wry humour and eye for the quirks and oddities of human nature, he chronicles how it grew to maturity.

Good+ in Good+ Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper. Leans. Top edge of the text block spotted. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 211 pages. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

A Vatican Lifeline: Allied Fugitives Aided by the Italian Resistance Foil the Gestapo in Nazi-Occupied Rome, 1944 by William C. Simpson

A Vatican Lifeline: Allied Fugitives Aided by the Italian Resistance Foil the Gestapo in Nazi-Occupied Rome, 1944 by William C. Simpson lands on the shelves of my shop.

Leo Cooper, 1995, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps to the endpapers and blanks;

From the cover: It is a widely held belief that the Italians in the Second World War failed to win much in the way of martial glory. But the scoffers tend to overlook the fact that most Italians had little or no feeling of animosity towards the Allies, and to wage war against an enemy with whom you have no quarrel is a contradiction in terms.

How real this contradiction was is vividly portrayed in William Simpsons dramatic account of his time in Rome after the fall of Mussolini and Italys withdrawal from the war in September, 1943, when thousands of Allied Prisoners of War, let loose in surrendered Italy, fell prey to occupying Nazi Forces. Simpson, an escaped POW, managed, after some hair-raising adventures, to find his way to Rome and soon discovered how widespread was the support of the Italians for the Allies and how deep-seated their hatred of the Nazis.

His adventures during the months before the Allies finally liberated Rome, helping to house and feed hundreds of Allied prisoners on the run, make compulsive reading and leave one in no doubt of the extraordinary bravery of the very many Italians who came to their aid. But the outstanding hero of this dramatic story is Monsignor OFlaherty, who, with remarkable sang froid, used the somewhat precarious neutrality of the Vatican where he was employed to help Simpson and his fellow fugitives.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper. Price Clipped. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Text complete, clean and tight.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [X] 230 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Beyond the Alps: A Summer in the Italian Hill Towns by Robert M. Coates

Beyond the Alps: A Summer in the Italian Hill Towns by Robert M. Coates lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Victor Gollancz, 1962, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps;

From the cover: Robert M. Coates, the New Yorker art critic, is the kind of traveller who travels purely for pleasure. He is not rushing from gallery to gallery, from Rome to Florence, to see famous masterpieces, for fear of missing something. One mid-May morning he and his friends were among the first that season to cross over the Little St. Bernard pass into Italy by car, with the objective of visiting at leisure the small Italian towns between the Swiss frontier and Rome. Aosta in the Alps, Arezzo, Lucca, Assisi, Orvieto are some of their stopping places: and what a tour of delight it was for them!

Mr. Coates is the sort of writer-traveller who lives where he travels: he gets the same proportional delight out of a good al fresco meal in the sunshine as he does from Signorellis relatively little admired masterpieces at Cortona or the Resur-rection by Piero della Francesca at Sansepolcro. He is as interested in the prevalence of Levi jeans among the youth of some small town as in its historical associations. For him the sun always seems to be shining and, if by exception it does not, why there are restaurants and cafes to sit in and people to talk to! He loves, as much as any traveller, the odd piece of folklore and the anecdote picked up in the course of chance conversations.

This is a book that has a special appeal today, when so many tourists turn to Italy that the big and obvious goals are now peppered with visitors. With Mr. Coates book the reader is directed to places far less frequented but no less rewarding. How relatively few, for instance, have gloried in the soaring cathedral at Orvieto and the magnificent church of San Michele at Lucca, city of churches! Far fewer have seen the fantastic Park of Monsters at tiny Bomarzo, only forty miles from Rome a cascade of grotesque, half-ruined statues designed for the Orsini family in the 16th century. And even Bomarzo is better known than the numerous small villages Mr. Coates took such delight in.

Beyond the Alps is like stimulating conversation with a practised raconteur: stimulating in the strict sense, because the reader is likely to finish with an irresistible urge to explore these treasures some of them hidden treasures for himself.

Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with fraying to the spine ends. Price Clipped. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Previous owners’ inscription to the first blank. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 159 pages. 8¾” x 5½”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944-45 by James Holland

Italy’s Sorrow: A Year of War 1944-45 by James Holland lands on the shelves of my shop.

HarperPress, 2008, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps; Illustrated endpapers and blanks;

From the cover: During the Second World War, the campaign in Italy was the most destructive fought in Europe a long, bitter and highly attritional conflict that raged up the countrys mountainous leg. For frontline troops, casualty rates at Cassino and then along the notorious Gothic Line were as high as they had been on the Western Front in the First World War. There were further similarities too: blasted landscapes, rain and mud, and months on end with the front line barely moving.

While the Allies and Germans were slogging it out through the mountains, the Italians were fighting their own bitter battles. Partisans mounted a crippling resistance campaign against the German troops but also battled Fascist forces in what soon became a bloody civil war. Around them, innocent civilians tried to live through the carnage, terror and anarchy while, in the wake of the Allied advance, horrific numbers of impoverished and starving people were left to pick their way through the ruins of their homes and country. In the German-occupied north, there were more than 700 civilian massacres by German and Fascist troops in retaliation for Partisan activities, while in the south many found themselves forced to make terrible and heartrending decisions in order to survive.

Italy today is renowned for the beauty of its landscape and the richness of its culture, while its suffering in 1944-45 is largely forgotten. This is the first account of the conflict to tell the story from all sides and to include the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. Offering extensive original research, it weaves together the drama and tragedy of that terrible year, including new perspectives and material on some of the most debated episodes to have emerged from the Second World War. It is a magnificent achievement by one of our finest young historians.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. Very small splash mark to the leading edge of the text block not affecting the leaves. Price Clipped. Previous owners’ inscription to the first blank. Text complete, clean and tight.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XLV] 606 pages. Index. Bibliography. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Rossini by Gaia Servadio

Rossini by Gaia Servadio lands on the shelves of my shop.

Constable, 2003, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Facsimiles;

From the cover: It is difficult to imagine today how popular Rossini was by the time he decided to stop composing he was just 32 and had written 39 operas. Today only a football star or a pop singer can command such enthusiastic reverence. But there is a mystery to his life why on a wave of such tremendous popularity did Rossini step aside?

Wagner, who had exchanged many ideas with Rossini, thought that he could be understood only in the context of his historical era. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic occupation the romantic movement swept across Europe. And opera was not only more popular than we can imagine, it was also powerfully political. Rossini was the link between the neoclassical movement and romanticism, between monarchies and revolutions, autocracy and liberalism.

After his triumphant years in Italy, where he was the most highly sought after composer of the age, he encountered the great voice of romanticism in the Paris salons, in meetings with Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and Eugene Delacroix, among others. But at heart he was a depressive, and when Beethoven told him that he should stick to comedies, Rossini never forgot or forgave him. Having complained in silence all his life, in the end he resolved to complain to God, to whom he dedicated his final Petite Messe. That he should have composed again at the end of his life is not a contradiction he wanted this Mass to remain private, to be performed for friends and God alone. He had come to hate the public and himself.

Using new material and previously unpublished letters, Gaia Servadio sheds much light on the mystery of Rossinis life. She relates the story of his difficult childhood and impoverished family life, his women, the divas, his nervous illnesses, and sets all this against the sweep of European history. It is not only an account of one of the most intelligent minds of his time and certainly one of the greatest composers of all time, but also of the age in which he lived.

Very Good+ in Very Good+ Dust Wrapper.

Black boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. [XII] 244 pages. Index. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!