Twilight in Italy

A new edition of the travel book that D.H. Lawrence wrote about his travels in Germany, Italy and the Alps. Twilight In Italy is one of Lawrence's most lyrical and upbeat books, an enchanting account of travelling around Europe.

Illustrated with paintings by J.M.W. Turner.

EXTRACT FROM THE PASSAGE WHERE D.H. LAWRENCE IS AT LAKE GARDA

I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace, as if it were aware of the contiguity of the physical world, the physical contact with the darkness and the heavy, suggestive substance of the enclosure. It was a thick, fierce darkness of the senses. But my soul shrank.

I went out again. The pavemented threshold was clear as a jewel, the marvellous clarity of sunshine that becomes blue in the height seemed to distil me into Across, the heavy mountain crouched along the side of the lake, the upper half brilliantly white, belonging to the sky, the lower half dark and grim. So, then, that is where heaven and earth are divided. From behind me, on the left, the headland swept down out of a great, pale-grey, arid height, through a rush of russet and crimson, to the olive smoke and the water of the level earth. And between, like a blade of the sky cleaving the earth asunder, went the pale-blue lake, cleaving mountain from mountain with the triumph of the sky.