Twilight in Italy

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence left England for the first time and travelled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence’s deeper wanderings - into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and fragile ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy hover dark spectres: the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I, upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), novelist, poet, playwright, painter, critic, is an icon of twentieth-century literature. He began writing at an early age, publishing his first novel, The White Peacock, when he was twenty-five, Sons and Lovers two years later and The Rainbow and Women in Love in his thirties. His hatred of militarism, openly expressed during the First World War, sparked a wave of vilification that forced him to leave England and embark on what he called his ’Savage Pilgrimage’. He spent the remainder of his life travelling - to Italy, Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Australia, Mexico and the south of France - and it was during this time that he wrote such classics as Sea and Sardinia, The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. With the exception of E.M. Forster, who called him ’the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’ and friends such as Aldous Huxley, Lawrence’s obituarists were dismissive and hostile. It was not until the Lady Chatterley Trial thirty years after his death and the subsequent publication of the book that Lawrence was finally recognised as one of the great writers and thinkers of his age.

Jan Morris, CBE. FRSL, is an award-winning (Golden Pen Award), bestselling historian and travel writer. ＂The 15th greatest British writer since the war,＂ The Times.