The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples

by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller

Book Overview

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226322025
• ISBN13: 9780226322025
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Ms. Hazzard has done it again- great read!

I love her books- her style, the language, the contents (never dull, yet never heavy)- just perfect! I love her fiction and now, also her essays! Must read if you love Napoli and surroundings... Brava!

The best!

An incredibly poetic book of essays by a wonderful writer -- you don't even have to have been to Naples to enjoy these!

Canta Napoli

Ms. Hazzard and Mr. Steegmuller have written a most astute and heart-warming book about Naples, Italy. They have felt the pulse of Naple, the temperament of the locals and written about it in beautiful prose. Naples is always a mixture of chaos and calm; of shouting and respect; of colors and light. As they write, ". . . Neapolitans move among their extraordinary architecture as in a natural element: Even the gradest edifices are not "monuments" but expressions of temperament in their nobility, their strangeness or sweetness, their theatricality." Thankfully Naples is still relatively unvisited by hordes of tourists and remains our personal, secret jewel. Thank you to these authors for capturing its essence and loving (most) all of it !