By the Ionian Sea
Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy

A Ramble To Calabria With Gissing By 1897, the English novelist George Gissing (1857 - 1903) had achieved a degree of financial and critical success after years of writing. He took a vacation to Calabria, the "toe" of the southernmost part of the "boot" of Italy. From his youth, Gissing had loved the......more

The title says what it is. An English classicist visits Calabria (and a bit of Puglia) in the late 19th century, searching for the past. He notes both the past and the present, but also perhaps inadvertently finds the future? I'd heard of this book many years ago as a possible source of the word "pap......more

A dreamy Victorian chap travels through Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia, pondering the classics, observing the locals, drinking wine for breakfast, going off the beaten track … well, to be honest there wasn’t even a beaten track in those days: “very rarely indeed could he show his garden to one from......more

George Gissing was a very 19th century English traveller; he travelled with dreams in his head of how he wanted southern Italy to be and when the reality turned out rather differently, he got into a muddle and retreated to his trunk (a trunk! he travelled with a trunk) of books. Rather similar in vi......more

In the late 1890s, the writer George Gissing set off on a trip to Southern Italy, an intensely personal journey into Magna Graecia with its ancient Greek ruins. “The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others;” he writes; “they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that time w......more