This fascinating volume contains a collection of travel writings by D. H. Lawrence, first published after his death in 1932. In this text Lawrence compares the vibrant world of the Etruscan civilization with the dilapidation of Benito Mussolini's Italy during the late 1920s. The Etruscan civilization is the relatively modern moniker given to the civilization originating from ancient Italy in the areas of modern Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio. Not much is known of the Etruscans, and in this fascinating exploration of their culture, Lawrence pieces together what he can in order to furnish a unique insight into this lost race. The chapters of this volume include: D. H. Lawrence, Cervereri, Targuinia, The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia, Vulci, and Volterra. We are republishing this antiquarian volume now complete with a new prefatory biography of the author.

By considering votive, mortuary and secular rituals, the volume offers a contribution to the continued study of Etruscan culture and gathers new material, interpretations and approaches to the less emphasized areas of Etruscan religion.

This book reconstructs political history from the spatial organization of ancient society, challenging the approach favored by classicists.

Seven essays D. H. Lawrence wrote after visiting Etruscan cities in central Italy.

From the author of The Rainbow, a travelogue of his journey through central Italy during the reign of Mussolini. Written in 1927 after visiting several Etruscan cities in central Italy, six of the seven essays contained in Sketches of Etruscan Places were posthumously published in 1932. The seventh, “The Florence Museum” is published here for the first time, along with forty-five illustrations reproduced with D. H. Lawrence’s own captions. The second part of this volume contains eight additional essays about Florence and the Tuscan countryside.

Now in paperback, a brief introduction to the mysteries of the enigmatic, ancient civilization in the area of modern Italy. The Etruscans were a powerful people, marked by an influential civilization in ancient Italy. But despite their prominence, the Etruscans are often portrayed as mysterious—a strange and unknowable people whose language and culture have largely vanished. Lucy Shipley’s The Etruscans presents a different picture. Shipley writes of a people who traded with Greece and shaped the development of Rome, who inspired Renaissance artists and Romantic firebrands, and whose influence is still felt strongly in the modern world. Covering colonialism and conquest, misogyny and mystique, she weaves Etruscan history with new archaeological evidence to give us a revived picture of the Etruscan people. The book traces trade routes and trains of thought, describing the journey of Etruscan objects from creation to use, loss, rediscovery, and reinvention. From the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy displayed in a fashionable salon to the extra-curricular activities of Bonaparte, from a mass looting craze to a bombed museum in a town marked by massacre, the book is an extraordinary voyage through Etruscan archaeology, which ultimately leads to surprising and intriguing places. In this sharp and groundbreaking book, Shipley gives readers a unique perspective on an enigmatic people, revealing just how much we know about the Etruscans—and just how much still remains undiscovered.

In these impressions of the Italian countryside, Lawrence transforms ordinary incidents into passages of intense beauty. Twilight in Italy is a vibrant account of Lawrence's stay among the people of Lake Garda, whose decaying lemon gardens bear witness to the twilight of a way of life centuries old. In Sea and Sardina, Lawrence brings to life the vigorous spontaneity of a society as yet untouched by the deadening effect of industrialization. And Etruscan Places is a beautiful and delicate work of literary art, the record of "a dying man drinking from the founts of a civilization dedicated to life."