Twilight in Italy
Travel Writing
In 1912, D. H. Lawrence left England for the first time visiting Germany, the Alps, and Italy. Although Twilight in Italy, about his experiences on his voyage, was his first travel book, Anais Nin said it ‘cannot be read as an ordinary travel book, for his voyage is philosophic, as well as a symbolic and sensuous one’. The essays about Germany have the tone of a journalistic search for information about an alien culture, while the Alps essays explore the author’s intense personal reactions to the mesmerizing landscape of the mountains. The Italian essays create an image of the polarity between North and South, a duality which extends metaphorically throughout Lawrence’s work. A powerful underlying theme uniting these essays is the threat of approaching war.