The Other Side of the Tiber
Reflections on Time in Italy
-
- £8.99
-
- £8.99
Publisher Description
A moving and illuminating memoir about a singular woman's relationship with a fascinating and complex country
A fresh, nuanced perspective on a profoundly perplexing country: this is what Wallis Wilde-Menozzi's unique, captivating narrative promises—and delivers.
The Other Side of the Tiber brings Italy to life in an entirely new way, treating the peninsula as a series of distinct places, subjects, histories, and geographies bound together by a shared sense of life. A multifaceted image of Italy emerges—in beautiful black-and-white photographs, many taken by Wilde-Menozzi herself—as does a portrait of the author. Wilde-Menozzi, who has written about Italy for nearly forty years, offers unexpected conclusions about one of the most complex and best-loved countries in the world.
Beginning her story with a hitchhiking trip to Rome when she was a student in England, she illuminates a passionate, creative, and vocal people who are often confined to stereotypes. Earthquakes and volcanoes; a hundred-year-old man; Siena as a walled city; Keats in Rome; the refugee camp of Manduria; the Slow Food movement; realism in Caravaggio; the concept of good and evil; Mary the Madonna as a subject—from these varied angles, Wilde-Menozzi traces a society skeptical about competition and tolerant of contradiction. Bringing them together in the present, she suggests the compensations of the Italians' long view of time. Like the country, this book will inspire discussion and revisiting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilde-Menozzi guides the reader along her slow perambulations through Italy, from Parma to Mandu-ria. Her loving remembrances meander much like the Tiber. She reconstructs the scenes that shaped her love for the country: her first trip to Italy, encounters with the legacy of earthquakes and volcanoes that irrevocably altered the human landscape, reflections on the power of the Slow Food movement which helped her redefine eating habits and transformed the pace she uses to approach new experienc-es. She visits the frescoes of both San Giovanni Evangelista and Santa Maria Assunta in Parma, paus-ing to meditate on the overwhelming power of the depiction of Mary, "bathed in a vision that all but put a woman on par with Christ." Her encounter with the Tiber launches her into exalted reflections on the capacity of the river to shape her life: "I visited the Tiber almost daily, like a shrine . The Tiber, though held by its banks and borders, told an unshapable story every day. I absorbed the wide perspec-tive of what it means to live the experience of an ancient river. Two observations that have stayed with me: It's never empty and never pitch-black." Part memoir and part travel guide, Wilde-Menozzi's ru-minations creates a vibrant excursion through her adopted homeland.
