Their life in America, which appears so prettily buttoned up with their fine family and excellent home and respectable friends, is really a series of escapes. They are lost in a summer haze of heat and sun-baked architecture and money, drifting in an open-ended tour of Italy from which they don’t ever really need to go home. In mid-December nearly sixty years after it was written, my tourist experience couldn’t quite match that of Clara and her mother Margaret very well.

I live with someone who always wants to read books of history for the places we travel, but I always want to read novels. I love literature for travel, books that share the street with you, put words to the scene from another moment, conjuring a secret experience in you as you look around as if you lived it in another life. Finally finishing in the dark further on our journey, in bed in Sicily with my phone on my chest to cast light, shivering on the side of a mountain. On the sofa in our holiday home near the Accademia where David resides, marking notes where we’d seen the same bridges and churches as we wandered through Firenze. A wisp of a novel, it could be read extremely quickly, but I managed it in little pieces as we traveled. It is still so nearly out of print (though seems to currently be packaged in this academic anthology), and eventually I did get this used copy that came with the world’s finest bookmark.īut it took me until I finally planned a trip to Florence, Italy before I took it down from the shelf and turned the pages. I knew then, hearing her speak about her story, that it would be a lovely novella and I would enjoy reading it one day. She was small and elderly and very quiet, and she could hardly believe what was happening to her little book that was no longer even in print. That year I went to see a talk at Lincoln Center in New York with Elizabeth Spencer (the author) and Adam Guettel (who wrote the musical). Like a lot of people, probably, I was unaware of this author until 2005 when this story was chosen for a theatrical adaptation, and now it’s a relatively famous musical.

The light in the piazza novel