By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy
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About this ebook
George Gissing
George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist. Born in Yorkshire, he excelled as a student from a young age, earning a scholarship to Owens College where he won prizes for his poetry and academic writing. Expelled and arrested for a series of thefts in 1876, Gissing was forced to leave England for the United States, teaching classics and working as a short story writer in Massachusetts and Chicago. The following year, he returned to England and embarked on a career as a professional novelist, publishing works of naturalism inspired by his experience of poverty and the works of Charles Dickens. After going through an acrimonious divorce, Gissing remarried in 1891 and entered a turbulent relationship with Edith Alice Underwood, with whom he raised two children before separating in 1897. During this time, after writing several unpublished novels, Gissing found success with New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892), and The Odd Women (1893). In the last years of his life, Gissing befriended H.G. Wells and travelled throughout Italy, Germany, and France, where he died after falling ill during a winter walk.
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Reviews for By the Ionian Sea
14 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 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 "paparazzo", which Fellini used as the name of a photographer in "La Dolce Vita" (we all know what became of the word later). But I'm highly skeptical. The word appears once as the last name of a hotel owner who was upset that his guests would not eat in his establishment. Why would Fellini (if he even read the book) just randomly pick that name?Anyway, that's neither here nor there. What's interesting is an Englishman's view of southern Italy in the late 19th century. He travels by train and horse-drawn coach, visiting ancient sites that mostly no longer exist. But he wants to step where ancient poets, monks and generals stepped. He wants to see what they might have seen, despite the many changes. He wants to breathe in the same air. He writes not only of what he knows of the past, but also of what he sees in the present, of the people, of their ways of life, the food, the wine, and how it's different from England.I made several notes that would require an entire blog-post or essay to comment on, so I'll leave you with one. This is a thought I've thought myself many times (comparing Italy to the US) and it has to do with beauty:"Pottery for commonest use among Calabrian peasants has a grace of line, a charm of colour, far beyond anything native to our most pretentious china-shops... There must be a great good in a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of servitude and suffering. Compare such domestic utensils...with those in the house of an English labourer. Is it really so certain that all virtues of race dwell with those who can rest amid the ugly and know it not for ugliness?" (pg 21)