Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young
woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the
beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore
collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic
New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the
pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is
constantly alive to them in the present.
With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of
course Goethe, but Hazzard's concern is primarily with the Naples of our
own time--often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to
transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history.
A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never
fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life--nor, as the
lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and
friendship that are necessary to sustain it.
Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri
Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical
letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently,
endlessly enchanted.
"Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place,
and a time, where 'nothing was pristine, except the
light.'"--Bookforum
"Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between
visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with
enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a
place."--Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely
book."--Booklist, starred review
