If you were thinking of jetting off to Italy this summer and laughed at the antics of this duo in the BBC programme Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour, Antonia Saunders, a research student at The Open University, has a book list you might want to explore.
Since this pair traced the footsteps of romantic poet Lord Byron, and countless other 18th century aristocrats on their ‘grand tour’, Antonia has focused on some delightful classics where authors took their inspiration from Italy. Here are her five recommendations:
1. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (published by Penguin Classics, 1855)
Dickens was no stranger to Italy having spent almost a year there in 1844 capturing his travels in his book Pictures from Italy.
It was good background for the rags-to-riches story of Little Dorrit’s family. Initially, the setting is London’s Marshalsea Debtor’s Prison, but this dramatically changes when her father emerges as the lost heir to a fortune. He pays his debts and leaves. What follows is the family tour of Europe, including Italy.
Check out Dickens’ description of their journey from France to Switzerland, where they stay at Lake Geneva before travelling in style over the Alps, through the Saint Bernard Pass and on to Italy.
That style includes coaches and guides, plus luggage transported by couriers with mules, before reaching Venice, and finally, Rome. Then read about their sumptuous stay in a palatial residence, representing the outward display of William Dorrit’s newly acquired wealth and status, and his reckless decadence.
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot (published by Oxford World’s Classics 1871)
This novel marries the tales of a number of characters and features stories of love, unrequited love, forbidden love and true love plus plenty of other emotions in between.
It’s set in the fictitious provincial Warwickshire town Middlemarch in the late 1820s and early 1830, but Rome features in a very brief, yet hugely significant couple of chapters in the novel.
George Eliot first travelled to Italy with friends for a brief stay in 1849, and several times later with partner George Henry Lewes during the 1860s, and it’s the writer’s travels to Rome that appear in the book.
Rome is the location for the honeymoon of dutiful orphan Dorothea Brooke, 19, and husband the Rev Edward Casaubon, a 45-year-old scholar. Yet marriage misgivings rise for the young bride when Edward doesn’t appear to want to include her in his intellectual pursuits in the city.
Her provincial education is insufficient to prepare her for all Rome has to offer. She realises their union will be one of unfulfillment.
Back in England, there are plenty of other characters weaved into a plot not without its dramas that include blackmail, inheritance, death and finding love second time around.
3. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (published by Penguin Classics 1880)
Expect a story here of personal freedom, independence, manipulation and betrayal. The protagonist, Isabel Archer, is an American woman who inherits a fortune.
She travels to Florence and then Rome where she becomes wooed by Gilbert Osmond, a refined, yet disinterested collector of art, whom she eventually marries.
Yet Isabel’s American optimism and independence is gradually undermined by Osmond’s coercive control, treating Isabel as if she were one of his pieces of art.
While Rome is initially a happy place for her during her stay as a tourist at the sunny and airy Hôtel de Paris, the home she settles in with Osmond, the Palazzo Roccanero, is dark and oppressive, like a prison, representing her marital situation.
James was a frequent traveller to Italy, describing it thus: “We go to Italy to gaze upon certain of the highest achievements of human power…”
4. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster (published by the Penguin English Library, 1908)
Inspired by a year-long stay in Italy, Forster introduces us to the naïve Lucy Honeychurch, living in a society where women were supposed to suppress their passions and follow convention.
While on holiday in Florence with Charlotte, Lucy’s chaperone and cousin, A Room with a View starts off quaintly discordant, with the pair upset that the room they had been allocated did not have the promised view.
To the rescue come fellow hotel guests Mr Emerson, and his son George, who gallantly swap rooms, giving them a view of Florence and the river Arno.
Italy serves as a place that challenges the rigid societal expectations of these English tourists, and for Lucy, somewhere in which she begins to question her feelings, ignited by a brief romantic encounter with George in the Tuscan hills.
Yet, back in England she becomes engaged to the snobbish Cecil Vyse, who sees Lucy as a perfect ideal, rather than the woman she actually is.
George, by this stage, is back on the scene along with a multitude of mixed emotions – on both sides.
5. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim (published by Virago 1922)
After her own holiday to the Italian Riviera, Elizabeth Von Arnim was inspired to write The Enchanted April where four ladies come together to rent a small medieval castle on the Portofino coast for a month.
It’s a story about very different women: one downtrodden, another sweet-faced, a third formidable and the last a socialite beauty.
Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot originally answer the ad offering the castle for rent. Mrs Wilkins longs to escape dreary, wet London, and to gain some independence from her controlling husband.
Two more travellers are recruited to split the cost: Lady Caroline Dester, a socialite, and Mrs Fisher, an elderly widow.
Arnim’s evocative nature writing and her descriptions of Italian flora and landscapes, demonstrate the restorative effects of nature on the happiness of the four women.
It’s a story of how they each blossom and unexpectedly change in the restful solitude and beautiful surroundings as opposed to a busy tour of famed cities and sites.
The bright and colourful Italian landscape contrasts wonderfully with the drab post-First World War England in the early chapters of the novel.
