The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples

By: Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller

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Synopsis: For Hazzard and her husband, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. And in "The Ancient Shore", Hazzard is our guide, as we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but her concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time -- often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life -- nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it.