The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a\nyoung woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations.\nIt was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The\nAncient Shore collects the best of Hazzard’s writings on Naples,\nalong with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis\nSteegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of\nPliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the\npresent.   With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry\nJames, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is\nprimarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently\nunforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor\nwho attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed\nby both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to\nacknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover\nof Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and\nfriendship that are necessary to sustain it.   Beautifully\nillustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri\nCartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical\nletter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still\nfervently, endlessly enchanted.   “Much larger than all its\nparts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where\n‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum   “Deep\nin the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between\nvisiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes\nwith enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost\nin a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times   “The\ntwo voices join in exquisite harmony… . A lovely\nbook.”—Booklist, starred review

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