Being Literary in Tuscany
I just finished reading In Maremma by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell. Up until now I knew very little about rural Italy and the daily life of Italians. Fortunately, this book helped in both areas.
According to Answers.com Maremma is an area in Italy, made up of southern Grosseto (Tuscany) and northern Viterbo (Latium) along the Tyrrhenian Sea and extending east to the Apennines. Flourishing in Etruscan and Roman times, it became marshy and was largely abandoned in the Middle Ages. The marshes were drained in the 19th and 20th centuries; and, there are now rich borax mines, good hunting grounds, and fertile areas where cattle and horses are raised.
According to Leavitt and Mitchell, Maremma is full of people trying to get by just as many people the world over are trying to do; except the people of Maremma are Italian, rural, small-townish, and more representative of Tuscany than people in the more touristy areas.
Having spent so much time in Italy, Leavitt and Mitchell decide to buy a house and, luckily, they took enough notes to write about that experience and the experience of living in Italy, like getting a driver’s license and having to choose between stores, restaurants, and where to have their olives pressed into oil.
The only hindrance to the stories was the preponderance of “literary” words sprinkled through the narrative. You know, those words no one uses anymore, aren’t in any modern dictionaries, but are found too often in “literary” stories and articles. They may be representative of a good post-secondary education, but if you don’t use the word when buying groceries at Costco, why use it in your writing.
Then there were the Italian words. You can tell they’re Italian because they’re in italics. Some are defined, others not, but there didn’t seem to be any sense to whether they would be defined, or not. After a while, I simply took the Huck Finn option and skipped over them figuring if they were important to the narrative, the authors would have provided a definition, otherwise they were simply added for “color” in much the same way as the “literary” words.
Mostly, though, In Maremma is an enjoyable book with more than enough information about living in rural Italy and living like Italians, like hanging your laundry out to dry or finding tarantulas or asps in your mailbox.
Interestingly, the Victorian novelist Ouida (pen name of Maria Louise de la Ramé) (1839-1908) published a book (novel?) with the same title in 1882. Ouida is famous for the children’s classic A Dog of Flanders (also see movie starring David Ladd [Alan’s son]).
According to Answers.com Maremma is an area in Italy, made up of southern Grosseto (Tuscany) and northern Viterbo (Latium) along the Tyrrhenian Sea and extending east to the Apennines. Flourishing in Etruscan and Roman times, it became marshy and was largely abandoned in the Middle Ages. The marshes were drained in the 19th and 20th centuries; and, there are now rich borax mines, good hunting grounds, and fertile areas where cattle and horses are raised.
According to Leavitt and Mitchell, Maremma is full of people trying to get by just as many people the world over are trying to do; except the people of Maremma are Italian, rural, small-townish, and more representative of Tuscany than people in the more touristy areas.
Having spent so much time in Italy, Leavitt and Mitchell decide to buy a house and, luckily, they took enough notes to write about that experience and the experience of living in Italy, like getting a driver’s license and having to choose between stores, restaurants, and where to have their olives pressed into oil.
The only hindrance to the stories was the preponderance of “literary” words sprinkled through the narrative. You know, those words no one uses anymore, aren’t in any modern dictionaries, but are found too often in “literary” stories and articles. They may be representative of a good post-secondary education, but if you don’t use the word when buying groceries at Costco, why use it in your writing.
Then there were the Italian words. You can tell they’re Italian because they’re in italics. Some are defined, others not, but there didn’t seem to be any sense to whether they would be defined, or not. After a while, I simply took the Huck Finn option and skipped over them figuring if they were important to the narrative, the authors would have provided a definition, otherwise they were simply added for “color” in much the same way as the “literary” words.
Mostly, though, In Maremma is an enjoyable book with more than enough information about living in rural Italy and living like Italians, like hanging your laundry out to dry or finding tarantulas or asps in your mailbox.
Interestingly, the Victorian novelist Ouida (pen name of Maria Louise de la Ramé) (1839-1908) published a book (novel?) with the same title in 1882. Ouida is famous for the children’s classic A Dog of Flanders (also see movie starring David Ladd [Alan’s son]).
posted by Carl Holiday at
12:01 PM
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