Customer Reviews

Italian Days

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Italian Days is one of best travel narratives about Italy that I have read. The anecdotes are interesting and ring true. Her impressions of the famous places she has visited were very similar to my own. Venice, Florence, Rome, the Vatican, Naples and Capri are lovingly described. Capri really is the most beautiful place on Earth.

Harrison writes with a woman's voice that is spontaneous and uninhibited. Unfortunately this sometimes comes across as fatuous. Women are defined by how attractive they are. An octogenarian aristocrat is described as looking to be decades younger. The old lady then goes on to tell a younger women how important it is make a good marriage with a wealthy man. A pretty young friend picks up a stranger she meets on a bridge in Venice; the author is abandoned while her friend goes off for a bout of casual sex. Harrison's attractive young daughter is accosted by men in the streets of Naples. Harrison herself is quite proud that she is still attractive to men at her age (around forty). The men she encounters are clichés. The vast majority are childish sex-crazed brutes with a few lovable little old men thrown in for variety. I don't regard this point of view as a fault but rather a heartfelt putting to paper of the author's own inner dialogue.

Several reviews have commented that the book is poorly edited. This is true. This is not a novel. The book is more a series of essays that all have in common being about places in Italy. The chapters mostly do not flow from one to another. Travel narratives are a curious class of writing in that they need not have a storyline. They assume more knowledge in the reader than would a guidebook. The travel books of Paul Theroux are similarly choppy.

This book had an excerpt in Travelers' Tales Italy which is also an excellent source for many more books about Italy.

Too many elipses here--not the ones you use to edit quotations, though there are plenty of those too- but the ones poor writers use as a sort of gesture to ineffability, the elusiveness of some particular moment. They are the written equivalent of a sigh and an outstretched hand grasping at empty air, and just about as sincere. Why didn't her editor cut this and similar crap out and help give some shape to a book that is about 65% brilliant, the sort of bravura performance any writer would envy. I couldn't decide between three or four stars for this book. Perhaps three stars with a fourth one in parentheses might have been best. I have great enthusiasm for Italian Days--its reflectiveness, its lyricism, its humor--but there are long sections that are self-conscious, affected, and just careless (the "scent of oleanders?"--they have no scent--poetic license is a myth, language is at its most evocative when it is most accurate). Subjectivity is dandy in travel writing but it needs, paradoxically, to be presented objectively: I am happy to see Italy through her eyes, but she regularly interrupts some of her best moments not to let us see things as she sees them, but rather to have us watch her while she is watching Italy (or is she just watching herself? sections read like really bad Proust). I love this book enough to wish that it had been much better. I love it enough to give it as a gift and then apologize for my bad taste in loving it. With greater discipline, this could have been just about the equal of any travel book ever written on Italy, a large claim, but a defensible one, and yet as it stands it is just one more good, fun Italy book. Somehow, given the author's talent, that doesn't seem to be enough.

"Italian Days" is a book for reflective readers--those who love to ponder beautiful language and beautiful things. It is as much a guide to the author, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, as to Italy, and I gladly could have continued my journey with her for another thousand pages. I made my first trip to Italy this past autumn, and although I knew and loved the book before I left, I was amazed at how accurately she captured the look, smell, feel--and taste (she writes mouth-wateringly of her Italian meals) of the country. I gave this book as a gift this year, and I certainly will do so again.

I've been carrying ITALIAN DAYS by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in my backpack to work--reading it on the train and over lunch. I think you'd better be eating a meal or at least not in a state of hunger when you read this book or you will lose your mind.

Harrison is of Italian descent, her maiden name is Grizzuti, and although she grew up in New York, her family hails from the south of Italy. The composition of this book is similar to that of Henry James' ITALIAN HOURS -- a composite of many trips, although the organizing priciple for Harrison's book is her current journey south for homecoming of sorts. She is a native American, but is connected to Italian relatives. I found her writing very reminiscent of M.F.K. Fisher, part observer, part philospher, part historian, part wanderer.

Harrison is divorced, and has a older child who is not traveling with her. She appears to be in her mid-forties, is attractive enough to be told so and "hit on" by some of the Italian males around her. She has a few interesting women friends who drift in and out of her stories. These women are coping with boyfriends and husbands and as they share their various woes Harrison recounts a few of her own.

Her writing is so warm and wonderful I felt as if I was inhabiting her body as I read. Unfortunately, as I read, I would be eating a chicken salad sandwich from the cafeteria at my desk while she was having a delectible meal of angel hair spagetti, baby asparagus, feta cheese and warm olives, served with a lovely local red wine, at an outdoor table on the cobblestones of a plaza before 12th century church in the warm Italian sun.

Harrison is a devout Roman Catholic, she attends masses and lights candle for loved ones. She visits churches and describes them in detail. She writes of the history of the church, WWII, the Romans, and other major forces in the development of Italy. She is cognizant of the "death in the midst of life" and the three great mysteries of life: childhood, love, and death. "As I am so shall you be, as you are now I once was." She observes people and describes them. She visits the graves of Shelley and other writers. She comments on the travels of Henry James and Ruskin whom she has read. She misquotes Byron.

Consider ITALIAN DAYS as the diary your best friend kept about her journey home to visit the old country and see all the relatives, and then shared with you. I love it!!

The first two-thirds of this book is a superb travel guide to Milan, Venice, Rome, and Campania. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison is very conversant with the best travel literature of the past (and thoughtfully provides us a useful bibliography) and -- more rare by far -- has a great deal to add as an Italian-American confronting the land of her birth.

After her chapter on Naples and Campania, the book takes an entirely different tack. The author goes to visit what remains of her family in rural Molise and Calabria. Big mistake. You can't mix pleasure with unfinished family business and expect to get anything other than heartsick.

I remember taking a visit to Hungary and Slovakia to visit my relatives some years ago. Their reaction: Why haven't you visited us before? Why aren't you staying longer? When are you coming back? Let us introduce you to your third and fourth cousins! It was interesting, at times even exhilarating, but it was no vacation. And you need a vacation from your vacation when you return.

Although Harrison's family visits break her book in two, it conveys a sense of truth missing from most books of the sort -- especially of the nefarious Tuscan villa genre. Our ancestors left their homes for a reason. They may not tell you the reason; but those left behind nursing their grudges will gladly set you straight -- possibly to your intense discomfiture.

So in the end, I have nothing but praise for this book. Especially if you are an Italian-American going back to the "Old Country" for a first visit, you must read this book. Like the author, take your vacation first -- then go face the music with your relatives.

Preparing for a trip to Italy last fall I purchased a number of books on the country -- mostly personal travelogues, essays, historical tomes. It was quite accidental that I picked up "Italian Days" and due to its sheer weight I can only surmise that my instincts told me to take the book home. Six months later I am back from Italy and just now reading Harrison's incredibly visual book -- it is like looking through my photographs and rereading my own journal. Harrison is the most sensual of writers approaching her subject with a woman's sensibility. The ruins of the Forum get no more attention than the flavors of gelatto near the Pantheon or rush of navigating the treacherous Roman streets. It is all true to the experience of Italy.

I wonder how such a book could be out of print and what a disservice that is to readers. I treasure my copy even more and can only recommend that readers grab Harrison's latest "An Accidental Autobiography" while they can -- her writing is a necessary addition to anyone's library.

This finely crafted book bespeaks a visceral love of Italy and things Italian that rises to true sublimity. Using the Italian human and cultural landscape as a springboard for lyrical meditations on the beauties, pleasures, and sorrows of life, Ms. Harrison takes her rightful place among writers like Henry James, Stendhal, Goethe, and Barzini, who have all celebrated the quintessential humanitas of Italy. If you have any feeling for the arts at all, don't deny yourself the experience of reading this magnificent book--and then get yourself to Italy! A literary and cultural tour de force.

I wasn't in the mood to write a review, but I was so shocked to see that Italian Days is no longer available that I simply had to. I loved this book. There are some texts that you feel like you've breathed in -- rather than read -- and this is one of them. It became my world while I was reading it, and it was a lovely, luscious, thinking world. It would be a shame to let it go out of print.

This book came very highly recommended, and I have to admit, I was disappointed. I found it self-absorbed and opaque, inscrutable. Grizzuti Harrison's Italy sounds like a place I would never want to go -- indeed, nothing like the place I've been to -- full of peevish storekeepers, American-hating townspeople, predatory men. I found nothing to love about the Italy depicted in this book and couldn't imagine why the author would subject herself to further months spent there.

The writing is very strange. The sentence structure loops archaically, and the asides that are often inserted into the sentences not only make the reading more difficult, but do nothing to enlighten the reader.

I also took issue with the book's tone and diction. Grizzuti Harrison spends pages and pages on high-flown quotations -- so many that it seems like she's padding her book because she has no thoughts of her own -- yet brings the reader crashing down from these utterances with a few strangely-placed "f-words."

I didn't understand this book. I prefer my own memories of Italy to this author's.

This is a difficult book to recommend. The problem is that the author's tone is painfully self-conscious and at times off-puttingly pretentious. Adding insult to injury, her writing style is awkward and convoluted, and her love of breaking up already lengthy sentences with ellipses only exacerbates the situation. She plays fast and loose with some of the historical facts she tosses out, too. And some of her observations seem so far-fetched that I swear she's just making up some of this crap for dramatic effect. I mean, I've been to Italy several times, and I've seldom encountered shop-clerks who are as outspokenly rude and negative as those depicted in abundance here. I found myself skipping occasionally large passages of her self-indulgent, meandering drivel in an attempt to stick to the meat of this book, which can actually be somewhat compelling.

When she is able to put a lid on the un-engaging cynicism, the book paints a colorful and vivid (and brutally honest) portait of Italy, its society, and culture. Some of her thoughts and observations are truly poignant. Basically, some hardcore Occam's Razoring could have improved this book profoundly. It almost reads as if it simply wasn't edited. I'm kind of surprised it even got published. As it stands, however, lengthy portions are a rambling mess seemingly aimed at pseudo-intellectual snobs brimming with unchecked ennui and bile. Which is sad since that might get in the way of the passages that really are worth reading.