The Ancient Shore – Dispatches from Naples

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Product Information

ISBN9780226322025
AuthorsFrancis Steegmuller, Shirley Hazzard
PublisherThe University of Chicago Press
FormatPaperback
Number of pages144
Weight (kg)0.196
Publishing Date01/10/2009
Price (excl. tax)€22.55
Tax€1.35
Price (incl. tax)€23.90
Availability3 units in external warehouse

Product Description

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. "The Ancient Shore" collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic "New Yorker" essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard's concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time - often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life - nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it. Beautifully illustrated with photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, "The Ancient Shore" is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.