The Ancient Shore
Dispatches from Naples
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
“[An] exquisite companion for the armchair traveler who dreams in the languages of literature and art. . . . A love letter to an ancient Italian city by the sea. . . . By temperament, I incline toward the understated appreciations of art and people I find in The Ancient Shore. . . . Such passages, simple as they are, constitute the unalloyed traces of love.”
“Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”
“The Ancient Shore reads like an extended prose poem about one of the most beautiful and complex, yet also one of the least well known, cities in the world. Without ever removing the veils of enigma that surround Naples, Shirley Hazzard and her late husband Francis Steegmuller take us to the heart of the city’s historical, cultural, and aesthetic fascination. As we join them on this pilgrimage, they invite us to meditate on the deeper meaning of travel, hospitality, encounter, and expatriation. Even for those of us who think we know Naples well, this book takes us someplace we have not been before.”
“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.”
“A beautifully written apologia for Naples and the Campania region. . . . Hazzard’s writing is an often brilliant travelogue in which the reader is made to recognize what he or she may have missed in the elusive city.”
Part I. Shirley Hazzard
Pilgrimage
A Scene of Ancient Fame
In the Shadow of Vesuvius
City of Secrets and Surprises
Naples Redux: An Ancient City Arrayed for the G-7
Part II. Francis Steegmuller
The Incident at Naples
Coda. Shirley Hazzard
Pondering Italy
Photo Credits
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature
Travel and Tourism: Travel Writing and Guides
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