The third tower : journeys in Italy

Description

In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice, on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination, he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries, reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice, he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna, to stand, fulfilling a lifelong dream, before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale. This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly, and at times painfully, up against an explosive present, producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium Content: Translator's introduction -- To be in Venice -- In praise of Venice -- The back alleys -- Pensione -- Ungheria -- The secret of St Mark's -- San Zanipolo -- A thought -- Evening in the piazza -- Signoras and signorinas -- Ca' Rezzonico -- Vicenza -- Vicenza -- The confession of a bourgeois 53 -- Heat -- Vittoriale -- House and cypress tree -- Solitude -- The people's train -- Bologna -- Ravenna -- Byzantium -- The tomb of Dietrich von Bern -- San Marino -- The third tower -- Ferrara -- Trieste, or, in a word, exhaustion.