Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo

Parks, Tim

ISBN 10: 0393239322 / ISBN 13: 9780393239324

Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

About this Item

Start a love affair with Italy. Great book, and a travelogue cum cultural essay. This title is being offered not by a professional book seller, but rather by a life-long collector reducing his library in connection with estate planning. Please note that international orders are discouraged as shipping costs are uneconomical and rarely closed. Listed international shipping is likely to be much too low. In general, international shipping rates start around $40 USD, and errors are often committed in the ABE auto listing.

Seller Inventory # 2249

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393239322
• ISBN 13: 9780393239324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

The best-selling author of Italian Neighbors returns with a wry and revealing portrait of Italian life―by riding its trains.

Tim Parks’s books on Italy have been hailed as "so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he delivers a charming and funny portrait of Italian ways by riding its trains from Verona to Milan, Rome to Palermo, and right down to the heel of Italy.

Parks begins as any traveler might: "A train is a train is a train, isn’t it?" But soon he turns his novelist’s eye to the details, and as he journeys through majestic Milano Centrale station or on the newest high-speed rail line, he delivers a uniquely insightful portrait of Italy. Through memorable encounters with ordinary Italians―conductors and ticket collectors, priests and prostitutes, scholars and lovers, gypsies and immigrants―Parks captures what makes Italian life distinctive: an obsession with speed but an acceptance of slower, older ways; a blind eye toward brutal architecture amid grand monuments; and an undying love of a good argument and the perfect cappuccino.

Italian Ways also explores how trains helped build Italy and how their development reflects Italians’ sense of themselves from Garibaldi to Mussolini to Berlusconi and beyond. Most of all, Italian Ways is an entertaining attempt to capture the essence of modern Italy. As Parks writes, "To see the country by train is to consider the crux of the essential Italian dilemma: Is Italy part of the modern world, or not?"

6 illustrations

About the Author

Tim Parks’s acclaimed books about Italy include Italian Ways, Italian Neighbors, and An Italian Education. He is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. He lives in Italy.