Format: 207 x 139 mm

Number of pages: 488

In twenty-two features from his travels, which he summarized in the volume Italian Hours, the modern American classic Henry James composes an ode to his beloved Italy with the same fervor with which he is interested in the "house of the human soul" in psychological prose. The special state of "wandering mind" prompts the author to investigate the nature of the civilizational phenomenon called tourism. During a forty-year journey through the country, which has experienced the rise and fall of the most famous ancient empire and is rising from the ashes as a reunited state, even the first excesses of mass travel at a time when car horns were just beginning to sound on the roads and historic preservation was in its infancy did not escape James's keen eye.
The reader will be amazed at how much the author's observations are still relevant both in the most visited places in Italy and in corners far from the noisy crowd. But whether James hits the Babylonian courtship on the Venetian lagoon, whether he picks up on the political conditions reflected in the streets of eternal Rome, whether he admires the backwardness of the countryside or admires the thousand-year-old beauty of Florence, Siena or Ravenna, he will serve the lover of Italy as an insider guide of the highest class. In his distinctive insight, aesthetic sensibility is combined with sparkling insight and the tradition of Anglo-Saxon humor, so the result of this passion for sweet Italy overshadows the travel books of his most wandering American predecessors: Mark Twain and Herman Melville.