Wild Italy

Product Description

Say the word Italy & a scene lights up in the mind: a cafe table in St Mark's Square perhaps a Renaissance fresco a Tuscan villa on a hilltop. There are many books about these things. In Wild Italy Tim Jepson takes a different tack leaving the well-worn tourist haunts behind him in search of fresher pleasures. He explores the whole country from its Alp-studded waist to its distant toe kicking the football of Sicily towards Africa. Like an unhurried lover he works his way down thigh & shin following the line of the Apennines locating the pressure points between continental & peninsular Italy pinching to see where the prosperous north gives way to the Mediterranean south looking for those last innocent stretches of littoral down one side & up the other where the bathers have not set up their parasols. Having lived in Rome & trekked the entire peninsula he knows the secret places that are as oxygen to a suffocating man after the murderous drive through the suburbs of Milan or Naples. He has picked out the loveliest spots in Sicily & Sardinia & plotted the last few pinpricks of Italian territory the scattered islands off the Tunisian coast which are some of the most isolated & primitive places in Europe. As well as having an extensive knowledge of wild places he also has the ability to write about them with passion. ' One view of a cypress tree or stone farm-house & we are entranced ' he writes 'overcome by that longing for the warm south which Icelanders describe nicely as the need for figs".'"