Susan Cahill - Desiring Italy: Women Writers Celebrate the Passions of a Country and Culture

BY SUSAN CAHILL

ANTHOLOGIES

Wise Women:
Two Thousand Years of Spiritual Writing by Women

Writing Womens Lives:
Autobiographical Narratives by
Twentieth-Century American Women Writers

Growing Up Female:
Stories by Women Writers from the American Mosaic

Among Sisters:
Short Stories of the Sibling Bond

Mothers:
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by Literary Daughters

Women and Fiction

Women and Fiction II

New Women and New Fiction:
Contemporary Short Stories

Motherhood:
A Reader for Men and Women

Big City Stories

(with Thomas Cahill)

The Urban Reader

Desiring Italy

For the Love of Ireland

The Smiles of Rome

FICTION
Earth Angels

NONFICTION
A Literary Guide to Ireland

(with Thomas Cahill)

A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright 1997 by Susan Cahill

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited, Toronto.

FAWCETT is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Owing to limitations of space, permission acknowledgments can be found on
, which constitute an extension of this copyright page.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Desiring Italy / edited and with an introduction by Susan Cahill.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77837-6
1. ItalyDescription and travel. 2. Visitors, ForeignItaly.
3. Women travelersItaly. I. Cahill, Susan Neunzig.
DG426.D45 1997
914.504929dc21 97-3973

v3.1

For Kristin Maria

Daughter and traveling companion, molto simpatica
Remembering Assisi at dawn,
And, always, the sun and deep shadows of Naples.

I taly pleasures more visitors than any other country in Europe. Enchanted travelers, male and female, come home to report her blisses, yearning only to return. They seduce their listeners with the particularities of the beloveds sensuality: Tuscany, Titian, Caf SantEustachio, paglia e fieno deliciosa. As memories flow, new journeys are conceived.

Writers have been declaring their love of Italian cities, art, and people for centuriesGoethe, Stendhal, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, Robert Browning, Ruskin, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence are the best known. But still to be heard are the stories of womens passions for Italy. As writers of travel essays, memoirs, and fiction, as exiles, pilgrims, and pioneers of one sort or another, they have, from multiple points of view in widely varying tones, had their say. Desiring Italy gathers together their best testimoniesbeautiful mixtures of affection, intelligence, and wit. Few write simply as tourists, as one-trip reporters. Each woman has found there a world of art or love, of personal meaningan encounter of such profound interest she must tell it.

If there is a unifying theme, it may be an intuition and embrace of the wholeness of life in Italy. Instead of the divorce between body and spirit, the secular and the sacred that alienates the more Protestant ethos of northern countries (and climates), in Italy physical and spiritual experience feels like one vibrant continuum. Perhaps it is the liberating humor of this acceptance of complexities and contradictions that intrigues and pleases women. Perhaps it is the pleasure that quickens the daily ordinary: the eating, the caring for children, the passeggiata. Sexual experience, masculine and feminine, seems like an embodied fact of lifea mixed, mysterious blessingrather than polarized modes of discourse or problems to be solved. No wonder the many women whove come to Italy and chosen to stay for good.

How have women writers remembered the joy of their times in Italy? Why are travelers so often happy here? Can the lover explain the mystery of the beloved?

The writer guides in this book reveal the resonant subtleties of real places and imperfect people. In fiction and nonfiction, they describe coming to understand something significant about a place. For some (Mary McCarthy in Florence, Edith Wharton in Milan), it is Italys prominence in the world of architecture; for others (Patricia Hampl in Assisi, Florence Nightingale in Rome), it is Italy as the setting of a passionate religious experience. One woman defines her decision to stay in Italy, to work here and not return to America, as a renunciation of rigidity. A few others, charmed by her sheer physicality and sociability, write stories of erotic love as memory (Edith Whartons Roman Fever), as aesthetic possibility (Elizabeth Spencers The White Azalea and Francine Proses Cauliflower Heads), or as romantic dream (Elizabeth von Arnims The Enchanted April, in which sunny Portofino on the Italian Riviera represents the fertile core of love and its paradisial transformations). As William Zinsser said in They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing, Some of the best travel writing turns up in novels and short stories.

Collectively, all the pieces serve a double purpose: first, as a brilliant literary companion for readers; and second, as a guide for travelers to the particular places described within each selection. Following each selection is a commentary to help the traveler connect as fully as possible with the individual writers sense of a particular place. I have visited the places named and evoked in all the writings. Following Mary McCarthy through Brunelleschis Florence and walking George Eliots and Elizabeth Bowens Rome and Mary Shelleys Venice, to mention only a few examples, gave me an unforgettable portion of their delight. My travels also enabled me to see for myself, with map in hand, how closely their descriptions and references match the places and settings as they are today. That became the focus of each commentaryhelping the traveling reader situate herself along the writers routes and within their personal context.

Ive also elaborated on aspects of places that especially concern the cultural history of women. For example, Muriel Sparks travel essay on Venice praises Titians painting of the Assumption in the Frari; my comments address the significance of the feast of the Assumption of Mary within contemporary feminist spirituality. Mary Taylor Simetis excursion to Enna in Sicily has as its background the myth of Persephone and Demeter and the importance of the Goddess to contemporary women, subjects which I discuss. Womens resistance to fascism during World War II is relevant to the selections from the autobiographical narratives by Iris Origo.