You're Going To Italy In A Novel By A Non-Italian Writer! Are You Going To Have A Good Time?

The rules, briefly: Italian novels by Italian authors do not count. For personal monolingual reasons, this list will skew heavily towards Anglophone writers, plus the French and German usual suspects whose translations get updated every twenty years or so. Less about “Italy” and more about how Northern Protestant ideas about Italy make it a convenient plot intensifier. Not everyone in the Northern Protestant imagination (expanded universe edition) goes to Italy to tangle with their own sexual repression/the rise of fascism and die, but all the necessary elements are present, and the odds remain high. If you see a guy with an elaborate, old-fashioned mustache holding a coil of rope next to a set of train tracks, he’s not necessarily going to tie a beautiful lady whose arms are stretched over her head and wiggling unnaturally to indicate distress to them, but the possibility has been pretty effectively raised no matter what he does.

More briefly: If a certain type of Anglo-American protagonist visits Italy, they do so in order to emphasize their own Anglo-Americanness. One visits Italy to commemorate, finalize, and consummate one’s fundamental and inescapable Britishness, and in this sense it can perhaps be said that none of them ever go to Italy, not really. If you could get to Italy, you’d be Italian. If you lived here, you’d be home now.

You're Going To Italy In A Novel By A Non-Italian Writer! Are You Going To Have A Good Time?

Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited, Helena, Men at Arms): No. Italy’s terrible, you’re terrible, but thank you for inventing Catholicism, which is declining terribly. A nation of vampires and witches, but thank God they’re not English, but good God a little Englishness certainly wouldn’t hurt. There’s no air in England, of course, but that’s what going to Italy is for.

William Demby (The Catacombs): Maybe. It’s a different racialized regime to post-war America, which isn’t nothing, but let’s not get carried away. They do some fairly interesting things with eggs here.

E.M. Forster: Yes!! And also very much no!!! Can Baedeker really be the key to Italy? Can Italians really be the key to Italy? Perhaps the key to Italy is to discuss Englishness with other English people, who are the worst people, in Italy — is that Italy over there? Only I thought I saw it for a moment — no, it was but a trick of the light — if only they hadn’t invented Catholics, Italians might really have made something of themselves — I think perhaps Italy used to be Italy once and somewhere along the way they must have dropped Italy into the Po — but they’re free, you know — the best Englishmen are Italian-finished, like those premium cows that eat grass most of their lives but spend the last six months of their lives bolting down corn before slaughter.

James Baldwin (Limit case, but Giovanni’s Room technically qualifies since it’s set in a Paris populated entirely with American and Italian expatriates): Oh, no. But if it helps, nowhere else is any better.

Patricia Highsmith (Those Who Walk Away, Talented Mr Ripley): Venice is a pretty good setting for an elaborate game of psychosexual cat-and-mouse with your father-in-law or lover-twin-nemesis. Is that what you mean by a good time? If so, then yes. Otherwise I don’t think I understand the question.

Susan Sontag (The Volcano Lover): Yes, and it’s terrible.

Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell To Arms): Yes. Did you know they have an army here and everything? War’s not a very good idea but I’d still like to be good at it. Let’s all go to Rome after we’ve finished killing everybody. They don’t take anything seriously here until you do the wrong thing and then you find out how seriously they take everything. That’s why they sleep during the afternoons in the South; it’s hard work pretending to be unaffected all day. It’s as good a place as any to lose a leg. I guess I’d give Italy a B.

George Eliot (Middlemarch): No. First off, Italy reminds you of how bad England is, and second off, they have a serious problem with white mice. And third of off, Rome is where your husband goes to cheat on you with history.

Alexandre Dumas (La San Felice): THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS MAKES GOOD SEMEN (Yes).

Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, Daisy Miller): Hmm. Hmm! Would you mind if I deferred my answer indefinitely? I haven’t yet quite decided what Italy is. It may be some sort of elaborate hospital for spirited-yet-sickly young ladies.

Stephenie Meyer (New Moon): Yes. Edward and Bella are the spiritual opposites of Dorothea and Casaubon, and Italy is where you go to learn that your husband actually hates history and only wants to read books made out of your skin, or about you, or whatever. Great time.

Thomas Mann (Death in Venice): Decidedly not.

Victor Canning (The Chasm): No, because of The War.

Muriel Spark (The Takeover, The Public Image): No, because of The Golden Bough.

Sybille Bedford (A Favourite of the Gods, A Compass Error): It is possible to have a good time in Italy, but not if you marry an Italian.

Alphonse de Lamartine (Graziella): See above.

Gabrielle Wittkop (The Necrophiliac): Yes, but the sort of good time that ruins everybody else’s good time.

F. Marion Crawford (Saracinesca): Yes, as long as you travel there before the emerging forces of modernity destroy everything fine and beautiful about this terrible, corrupt, bewitching, disgusting swamp of iniquity – and adventure!!!

Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Marble Faun): You must be mistaken. I have never been to Italy. My good friends and colleagues in the Classics department of this small New England institution will be happy to vouch for my whereabouts on the night in question.

Sigrid Undset (Jenny): No!! No!! No! No Scandinavian can see Italy and live — why would you look at it? Why would you look at it? How could you return to your old life now, now that you have seen wine, and dancing? Why did you look at it?