By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy

Gissing south of Rome: coasts, ruins, inns, and a scholar's eye on a poor, brilliant shore. By the Ionian Sea is a ramble that keeps stopping for history — Magna Graecia under the modern dust. Travel prose with a classicist's hunger and a novelist's pity. Calabria without the postcard. Ruins, malaria talk, a train, a hunger for Greek names on Italian dirt. Gissing travels as a man who has been poor, and it shows. Taranto, Cotrone — the Greek names he came south to taste. Read in English, unabridged.