Tuscan Cities: Travels Through the Heart of Old Italy

For William Dean Howells, American Consul to Venice for four years, Italy was the country that fashioned his prose and fostered his love of travel. One winter, he travelled the length and breadth of Tuscany, from Florence and Fiesole to Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, and Prato. Immersing himself in all things Tuscan, he describes in compelling detail the daily life -- funerals and weddings, military marches and lovers' trysts -- of a place that was bursting with life and endlessly fascinating to him. He muses on the character of the Italians that he meets, revelling in their sense of drama, their sentimentality and impulsiveness, and vividly resurrects the artistic, tempestuous, world-changing history of Tuscany, from its mysterious, ancient beginnings to the birth of the Renaissance and its status as cultural soul of Italy. Tuscan Cities, a passionate Italophile's glowing tribute, cannot fail to inspire anyone who has ever travelled to or loved Tuscany as Howells did.

William Dean Howells (1837-1920), writer, critic and pioneer of the American realist school, was one of the most influential writers of American fiction during the last quarter of the 19th century. A lifelong friend of Mark Twain and a contemporary of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson, Howells’ own literary career took off with his novel, A Modern Instance, but The Rise of Silas Lapham is his best-known work. Widely acknowledged as the ＂American Dean of Letters,＂ Howells was one of the first seven chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he later became president, and which instituted its Howells Medal for Fiction in 1915.

Matthew Stevenson is a former editor at Harper’s magazine. He remains a contributing editor to Harper’s and writes for several other publications including American Scholar, Vanity Fair and the American Spectator. He is also author of Mentioned in Dispatches.