Italy Observed - In Photography and Literature

A collection of photographs taken over the past three decades is combined with excerpts from short stories, essays, novels, and letters in an attempt to sketch out some of the most salient features of the Italian moral landscape. The photographers and writers represented are either American or Italian. The majority of American writings give the observer's experience of Italy. The contributions of Italian writers reflect on certain aspects of Italian life. Romanticism is by one definition an interest in the remote in time and space, and it is more the domainof the foreigner. Realism, by the same token, says the visionary is denied by the immediate intimacy of the native. A weld of the two is some kind of universal, which exiists prior to history and is at the heart of the struggle giving rise to mythology...

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