Twilight in Italy

D.H. Lawrence's first travel book and an important insight into the roots of his literary genius.

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence traveled 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. It was here that he wrote Sons and Lovers and here too that we see the early flowering of the prose that would come to define Lawrence’s oeuvre. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence’s deeper wanderings–into philosophy, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and the fragility of ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy are the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I; upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.