Say the word Italy, and a scene lights up in the mind: a cafe table in St Mark's Square, perhaps, a Renaissance fresco, a Tuscan villa on a hilltop. There are many books about these things. In Wild Italy, Tim Jepson takes a different tack, leaving the well-worn tourist haunts behind him in search of fresher pleasures. He explores the whole country from its Alp-studded waist to its distant toe kicking the football of Sicily towards Africa. Like an unhurried lover, he works his way down thigh and shin, following the line of the Apennines, locating the pressure points between continental and peninsular Italy, pinching to see where the prosperous north gives way to the Mediterranean south, looking for those last innocent stretches of littoral, down one side and up the other, where the bathers have not set up their parasols. Having lived in Rome and trekked the entire peninsula, he knows the secret places that are as oxygen to a suffocating man after the murderous drive through the suburbs of Milan or Naples. He has picked out the loveliest spots in Sicily and Sardinia and plotted the last few pinpricks of Italian territory, the scattered islands off the Tunisian coast which are some of the most isolated and primitive places in Europe. As well as having an extensive knowledge of wild places, he also has the ability to write about them with passion. 'One view of a cypress tree or stone farm-house and we are entranced,' he writes, 'overcome by that longing for the warm south which Icelanders describe nicely as the need for figs .'
Reviews
'Readers of the second edition of Tim Jepson's gem of a book will be... thanking the author for leading them away from the obvious in Italy - the cities and galleries, the beaches - and into the wild.' - The Sunday Times. 'Beautiful photographs and excellent maps... He encourages you to visit the wilderness of the Abruzzi or experience the excitement of Mount Etna.' - The Independent on Sunday.
Author description
Jepson is an Oxford graduate and the author of more than ten books about Italy. He has lived and worked in Italy as the correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph and is now the Commissioning Editor for Travel on the same newspaper.
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