Risotto with Pipis: Frank Sargeson in Italy‪.‬

In 1927 a twenty-four-year-old Frank Sargeson took a year out from his job as a solicitor in Auckland and headed overseas, partly to escape the misery of an unrequited love-affair, and partly to experience European culture at first hand. (1) During the summer of his year away, he made a two-month walking tour of Europe, travelling from Paris, through France and Switzerland and on into Italy, where he spent two weeks in and around Milan, Genoa and Florence. Almost no letters from that period survive, and while his trip diary and his unpublished memoir 'A New Tramp Abroad' cover his travels in France and Switzerland in some detail, they stop tantalizingly short as he crosses into Italy, where he would have what seemed both at the time and in retrospect a momentous--deed life-changing--experience. (2) The archival trace of Sargeson's weeks in Italy amounts to a single letter, written in pencil, addressed to his friend Lucy Bush, the wife of his English lover Find. While the contents of the letter is fairly typical of his trip diary in that both deal with where he has been and what he has seen, the weather and the price of things, the letter also shows Sargeson going to some effort to engage a reader he is clearly fond of: