The title says what it is. An English classicist visits Calabria (and a bit of Puglia) in the late 19th century, searching for the past. He notes both the past and the present, but also perhaps inadvertently finds the future?

I'd heard of this book many years ago as a possible source o...more

Thoroughly enjoyable. I’ve read the book as part of my reading challenge for 2019. This is by a local author, I chose the book randomly by way of it being the cheapest on eBay. I had never read Gissing before, though as a Wakefield lass I knew of him.

A more entertaining book I could n...more

Written at the turn of the century, with the author in declining health, he moves through a region looking for and admiring the fading traces of the Roman and Goth imprints. He writes well and lovingly connects his places to their antecedents in history.

In the late 1890s, the writer George Gissing set off on a trip to Southern Italy, an intensely personal journey into Magna Graecia with its ancient Greek ruins. “The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others;” he writes; “they make me young again, and restore the keen impressions of that tim...more

A Ramble To Calabria With Gissing

By 1897, the English novelist George Gissing (1857 - 1903) had achieved a degree of financial and critical success after years of writing. He took a vacation to Calabria, the "toe" of the southernmost part of the "boot" of Italy. From his youth, Gissin...more

This is a mostly pleasant little memoir of a mostly pleasant little tour in 1897. Gissing chose his destinations from readings of Latin and Greek, and seems more interested in comparing the real scenery to what he imagined than in getting to know Calabria in his day. And there are distasteful mom...more

A few years before his untimely end during a period of failing health English Novelist George Robert Gissing's travelog "By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy" recounts a byway excursion to Magna Grecia the land of Roman, Goth, and Greek (to name a few) which captivated him as a...more

George Gissing was a very 19th century English traveller; he travelled with dreams in his head of how he wanted southern Italy to be and when the reality turned out rather differently, he got into a muddle and retreated to his trunk (a trunk! he travelled with a trunk) of books. Rather similar in...more

I was casting about for something to read on a recent holiday on Kephalonia when I came across this. I've read the odd Gissing novel and always thought it a shame that his name isn't more widely known. Perhaps it's time The Nether World got the BBC costume drama treatment, although I'm not sure how it...more

Pleasant reading - like the idea that it was written so long ago yet we can still ramble along together.