In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war & charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites & scenes had once exercised a strange & terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals & inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to st&, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale. This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, & at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders & existential horrors of Mussolini`s new Roman Imperium. Antal Szerb was born in Budapest in 1901. Best known in the West as a novelist & short story writer, he was also a prolific scholar whose interests ranged widely across the whole field of European literature. Debarred from a university post by reason of his Jewish ancestry, he taught in a commercial secondary school until increasing persecution led to his brutal death in a labour camp, in 1945. Yet the tone of his writing is almost always deceptively light, the fierce intelligence softened by a gentle tolerance, wry humour & understated irony. Pushkin Press`s publications of Szerb`s work include his novels Journey by Moonlight, Oliver VII & The Pendragon Legend, as well as the short story collection Love in a Bottle & the history The Queen`s Necklace.