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 left England for the first time and travelled 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.

This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence's deeper wanderings: into philosophy, opinion, life, nature, religion and the fate of man.

With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and fragile ancient traditions, "Twilight in Italy" is suffused with nostalgia and premonition.

For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy hover dark spectres: the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I, upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever.