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.

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Italian Hours
 
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

AUTHOR:

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia and lived in Hong Kong, Italy, and New Zealand before coming to the United States at the age of twenty. She was the acclaimed author of four books of nonfiction and six novels, including The Transit of Venus, which won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1980, and The Great Fire, which won the the National Book Award for fiction in 2003.

Francis Steegmuller (1906–94) was an editor, translator, critic, and literary biographer.