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Smiling Shelves

Books About Italy - My Recommendations

10/9/2014

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I visited Italy earlier this summer – Florence, Pisa, Milan, and Venice. Before I go on a big trip like this, I like to find out more about the area I’m going to visit. And what better way to do that than reading? If you’re planning to head to any of these places in the future, or if you've already visited them and want to know more, or if you’re an armchair traveler that loves learning about Italy, then I recommend any of the books below!
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The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy

          This is a series of essays and travel narratives written in the 1960s. It gives a wonderful picture of what life was like in Florence 50 years ago, as well as a basic overview of Florentine history. There are certainly dated images – the telegraph boy on his bicycle – but those are part of the fun. And surprisingly little has changed since 1963.


Find it on: Goodreads  |  Amazon  |  Better World Books

The Artist: the Philosopher, and the Warrior: The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped by Paul Strathern

          I run out of breath every time I say that title. But despite that, it’s really a fascinating book. Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia intersected for a few months in 1502, but the book covers a broader span than that. It gives you a picture of life, politics, art, science, and warfare in Renaissance Italy. What a scandalous time!

Find it on: Goodreads  |  Amazon  |  Better World Books
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Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa by Nicholas Shrady

          I love this book for the cover alone. But to be perfectly fair, the words inside of it are good, too. Shrady follows the building and the leaning of the Tower of Pisa from its inception to its (temporary) salvation within the last decade. He does wander off topic for a chapter or two to cover the larger history of the city of Pisa (nothing wrong with this). It’s a short and sweet history of a fascinating and extraordinarily recognizable landmark.

Find it on: Goodreads  |  Amazon  |  Better World Books

Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces  by Robert Clark

          The city of Florence flooded very badly in November of 1966. The water was twenty feet high in some places and brought with it trees and mud and everything else that washed downstream. Parts of many churches, museums, and the national library were underwater. Robert Clark does a wonderful job of bringing this disaster and its subsequent recovery to life through the stories of eyewitnesses.

Find it on: Goodreads  |  Amazon  |  Better World Books
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Brunelleschi’s Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King

          This was my favorite book of all those I read to prepare for my trip. It was well-written, well-researched, and taught me a lot. More than five hundred years later, Brunelleschi’s dome is still the largest masonry dome in the world, and it was built without much of the knowledge and experience we have now. Brunelleschi even had to invent many of the machines used because nothing like them existed yet. Maybe it just goes to show how much of a nerd I am, but I found this book completely fascinating, and my engineer husband did as well.

Find it on: Goodreads  |  Amazon  |  Better World Books
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Following the Sun [Review]

11/21/2013

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Following the Sun is the story of John Hanson Mitchell’s journey from Spain to Scotland. On a bicycle. He begins in Spain on the vernal equinox and ends in Callanish on the summer solstice. Along the way, he encounters many interesting characters and stories – and a lot of flat tires.

Mitchell tells the story of his bicycle journey in a laidback fashion. Even when he’s battling against wind and rain, it doesn’t seem to faze him much. His descriptions of some of his meals made my mouth water. And who wouldn’t want to travel around to little villages all over Europe, staying in bed & breakfasts (a.k.a., a very nice person’s spare bedroom), and sampling local delicacies at the town café (or pub)?

This was also an educational book. Mitchell is a lover of the sun and sun lore. He intersperses stories from his journey with stories from world cultures. He covers everything from mythology to the development of the heliocentric view of our solar system. Most of this was interesting. Some of it I could have lived without (there’s a lot of sacrificing to the sun god in world history). And as a Christian, I didn’t really appreciate him lumping Biblical events in with world myths and trying to explain how these stories evolved over the past five million years.

A minor pet peeve – his writing style really bugged me at the beginning. He is a great user of run-on sentences. For example: “They wore wide-brimmed straw hats held in place with white bandannas tied beneath their chins, and they all had round, nut-brown faces, with rosy cheeks and white teeth, and many of them wore full-cut blue or brown skirts and heavy shoes.” Seriously? Why isn’t that three separate sentences? After awhile, though, he either stopped writing like this or I stopped noticing, because eventually it no longer annoyed me.

As an armchair traveller, I like being able to learn as I read. But in my opinion, this book could have used more travel narrative and less history lesson, especially since his worldview didn’t agree with mine. I picked it up because the idea of riding a bicycle from Spain to Scotland intrigued me. That’s the story I was hoping to read. It was in there, but there was a lot of other stuff that got in the way.

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Learning

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Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day [Review]

7/12/2013

1 Comment

 
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I am a travel writing junkie. It’s usually the section I head for first in a bookstore, eager to discover another person’s take on France or Italy or Australia. I love to travel vicariously (although I must admit, I do a fair amount of traveling myself – it’s not all armchair-centered).

Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day by Doug Mack sounded right up my alley. Inspired by a trip his mother took in her 20s, Mack travels through Europe using only Arthur Frommer’s 1963 edition of Europe on Five Dollars a Day as his guidebook. He does his best to stay only in Frommer-mentioned hotels and eat only at Frommer-mentioned restaurants. Hunting down these places is dubbed “Frommering” by his travel companion, Lee. Unsurprisingly, many of them are closed or completely changed. A fair amount of Mack’s book is spent reflecting on what it means to be a tourist and how tourism itself changes the places that tourists come to see. I learned a lot about the history of travel and how Frommer’s guidebook blazed a trail for the middle class tourist. Europe was no longer just for the rich and famous.

Mack visits eleven cities in two different trips – Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Vienna, Venice, Rome, and Madrid. He’s shy and hasn’t traveled much alone, so much of the book is spent on eye-opening experiences as a foreigner in a strange land. And honestly, this was the part I found the most tiring. Round about Zurich, his friend Lee goes home and Doug is left to finish his trip alone. And he is lonely. And whiny. So lonely and whiny, in fact, that it spoils a portion of his trip (and my enjoyment of the last section of the book). He claims to be “over” Venice in six hours and forty-three minutes, and challenges anyone to stay interested in the city longer than that. Well, Mr. Doug Mack, I have spent six days in Venice and would gladly go back. Every traveler has been lonely at some point in their trip, even if they are traveling with friends or family. It’s hard being in a different country without all of the familiar things around us. But don’t let that seep into your travel writing. Surely some editor down the line should have said, “Cut the whining and tell me what you saw!”

His optimism recovers by the last chapter in Madrid. The book ends positively, and hopefully inspires at least someone to travel to Europe (though a more recent guidebook is recommended). Mack’s adventures are amusing and enjoyable, for the most part. And if – when – he travels again, I hope he leaves the whining at home and learns to live in the moment. After all, that’s what travel is really about.

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    My name is Julie, and I own a lot of books. As in, they are stacked on the floor because I've run out of room on the shelves. And those shelves? There are so many books on them that they smile -- not sag; smile. This blog will cover book reviews and all manner of other bookish things.

    You can contact me at julie@smilingshelves.com.

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