There’s something visceral about reading about a place, atmosphere, history, the people living in another country while you’re in said country traveling, traveling, traveling. The writer, Shirley Hazzard, spent years in Italy. She writes about the ex-pats who lived and loved on the island of Capri and various characters yearning and squirming amidst the undulating hills of Tuscany and the ancient fortressed towns like Siena. I felt the heat in the rooms, saw the glowering ambered skies of Italian sunsets, tasted the first sips of a spritz, the adrenaline rush driving the curved and narrow mountain roads…oh my, it was all there on the page. 

THE LITTLE VIRTUES by Natalia Ginzburg

These essays, published between 1944 and 1962, are Ginzburg’s teaching moments on “not the little virtues but the great ones.” The author lived and wrote through Fascism (born in Palermo, Sicily) and the Second World War. Her first husband, a resistance leader, was murdered by Fascist police. Yet, for all the horrors she witnessed, these eleven essays are meant to educate adults on looking at the world through the lessons, both good and bad, taught to children. 

Favorite line(s): There is a kind of uniform monotony in the fate of man. Our lives unfold according to ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm. Our dreams are never realized, and as soon as we see them betrayed, we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets, our life slips by.

GREENE ON CAPRI by Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard and her husband were friends of the writer Graham Greene on the island of Capri, Italy, in the 1960s until his death in 1991. Hazard doesn’t idolize Greene but shows him as a writer in pursuit of the inspiration and quiet needed to write his requisite 350 words a day. With his bouts of anger, religious beliefs, and loves and dislikes, Hazzard paints Greene in soft colors while describing a mercurial writer spending his life eluding definition. 

Favorite line(s): To write fiction is to learn to inhabit other skins whether thinner or thicker than one’s own . . . In his best work, Graham excelled at those acts of convinced imagination and irresolute morality. There was, also, an authorial distance that could make it hard to establish where his sympathies lay—in Brighton Rock, for instance—or whether sympathies were engaged at all, as in The Quiet American, where cynicism, scarcely stirred by sensuality, expresses itself in violence and displeasure. In The End of the Affair, the temperament of the narrator, Bendrix, is unsparingly close, in anger, wit, and struggle, to Graham’s own—so faithfully drawn as to challenge the credibility of the character by seemingly improbable contrasts of mood: an accomplished exercise in self-knowledge.

CLIFFS OF FALL AND OTHER STORIES by Shirley Hazzard 

These ten short stories are delicious fly-on-the-wall immersions into the stagnant heated morning to evening laments of characters moving in and around Italian cities and countrysides. There are lots of side glances, afternoon siestas, long dinners, and malingering marriages. Hazzard, an expert on capturing a character’s interior failings, “He followed her into the garden, feeling rather like a child with whom other children will not play, and who is allowed, for that reason, to trail about after the grownups” does it in scene after scene. 

Favorite line(s): “You see how it is,” said Bernard, with a faint smile. “in this country everything has been done, as it were—even the landscape has been done to the point where one becomes a detail in a canvas. And they all know too much. In Italy one is almost too much at ease, too well understood; all summer here I feel that nothing new can happen, nothing can surprise or call our capacities into question; that none of us can add anything.”