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Following my visit to Italy last month it’s inspired me to visit again. It seems to be a country that has been inspiring writers for decades. Here are just a few that might inspire you to visit Italy.
Books to Inspire You to Visit Italy
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The city of Verona, torn apart by the violent feud between the families of Montague and Capulet, is a powder keg waiting to explode; the Prince of Verona, seeking to restore order, has declared any breach of the peace punishable by death. But for the young Montague Romeo, and his lover, the Capulet Juliet, the enmity of their families is immaterial. Meeting in secret, the two lovers gradually spiral towards disaster as their respective families edge closer towards open warfare.
A play that has inspired films as diverse as Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet, Romeo and Juliet is a dazzling combination of passion and hatred, bawdy comedy and high tragedy.
A Room With a View by E.M.Forster
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.
Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Four women, with very different backgrounds and characters – the artless Lottie Wilkins, the pious Rose Arbuthnot, the cantankerous Mrs Fisher and the haughty Lady Caroline Dester – respond to an advertisement in The Times offering a medieval castle to rent in Italy that April. As their joint holiday begins, tensions flare up between them, but they soon bond over their past misfortunes and rediscover hope and the pleasures of life in their tranquil surroundings.
A huge best-seller when it was published in 1922, The Enchanted April has inspired generations of readers since and established Portofino and the Italian Riviera as a mainstay of the tourist circuit.
Agostino by Alberto Moravia
Thirteen-year-old Agostino is spending the summer at a Tuscan seaside resort with his beautiful widowed mother. When she takes up with a cocksure new companion, Agostino, feeling ignored and unloved, begins hanging around with a group of local young toughs. Though repelled by their squalor and brutality, and repeatedly humiliated for his weakness and ignorance when it comes to women and sex, the boy is increasingly, masochistically drawn to the gang and its rough games. He finds himself unable to make sense of his troubled feelings. Hoping to be full of manly calm, he is instead beset by guilty curiosity and an urgent desire to sever, at any cost, the thread of troubled sensuality that binds him to his mother.
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Tom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over.
Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he’s willing to kill for it. When his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking.
Letters From the Palazzo Barbaro by Henry James
The novelist Henry James arrived in Venice as a tourist, and instantly fell in love with the city – particularly with the splendid Palazzo Barbaro, home of the expatriate American Curtis family. This selection of letters covers the period 1869-1907 and provides a unique record of the life and work of this great writer.
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
The story begins in 1962. Somewhere on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline a young innkeeper, chest-deep in daydreams, looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and views an apparition: a beautiful woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an American starlet, he soon learns, and she is dying.
And the story begins again today, half a world away in Hollywood, when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio’s back lot searching for the woman he last saw at his hotel fifty years before.
Gloriously inventive, funny, tender and constantly surprising, Beautiful Ruins is a novel full of fabulous and yet very flawed people, all of them striving towards another sort of life, a future that is both delightful and yet, tantalizingly, seems just out of reach.
Lonely Planet Italy Travel Guide
Lonely Planet Italy is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Wander through chariot-grooved streets in Pompeii, sample the abundant varieties of wine and olives as you tour Tuscany, or toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain in Rome; all with your trusted travel companion.
Get to the heart of Italy and begin your journey now!
The 500 Hidden Secrets of Rome
The 500 Hidden Secrets of Rome helps you set out to discover the most attractive, fun and unique places in Italy’s capital. Luisa Grigoletto and Christopher Livesay share 500 addresses and facts that many tourists don’t know, sometimes off the beaten track, but always loved by the locals and worth a visit.
This books lists, among other things, the 5 best gelaterias, the 5 most beautiful historic shops, 5 breath-taking palazzi which played an important role in art history and 5 sites where major Italian films were shot.
Have you read any books that have inspired you to travel?
Let me know in the comments.
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Such a great post! I love reading and can’t wait to read some of these. Been to Italy a few times but it’s a country I could go back many times!
I only recently visited Italy for the first time. Definitely want to go back.
I totally love reading books before I travel someplace. I love Italy and have read some of these but others I have not, so now I have new additions to my wishlist!
Thanks. Love that you’ve been inspired. I’m always adding books to my wishlist and I have so many on shelves waiting to be read.