Wild Italy: A Traveller's Guide

In Wild Italy, Tim Jepson leaves the well-worn tourist haunts of traditional guide books behind him in search of fresher pleasures. He offers a rural, rather than an urban Italy, revealing the best of the long walks, mountain hideaways, woods, plains, sea coasts and remote islands where travelers can still find a refuge from the modern world. He explores the whole country from its Alp-studded waist to its distant toe kicking the football of Sicily towards Africa. Like an unhurried lover, he works his way down thigh and shin, following the line of the Apennines, locating the pressure points between continental and peninsular Italy, pinching to see where the prosperous north gives way to the Mediterranean south, looking for those last empty stretches of littoral, down one side and up the other, where the bathers have yet to set up their parasols. Having lived in Rome and trekked the entire peninsula, Tim Jepson knows the secret places that are as oxygen to a suffocating man after the murderous drive through the suburbs of Milan or Naples. He has picked out the loveliest spots in Sicily and Sardinia and plotted the last few pinpricks of Italian territory, the scattered islands off the Tunisian coast which are some of the most isolated and primitive places in Europe. An extensive knowledge of, and deep passion for wild Italy are reflected in Jepson's writing. "One view of a cypress tree or stone farm-house and we are entranced," he writes, "overcome by that longing for the warm south which Icelanders describe nicely as 'the need for figs'.".…