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."

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.

D. H. Lawrence, in full David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930), was an English author of novels, poems, plays, short stories, essays and travel books. He is valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism, as well as one of the finest writers in English literature. His novels "Sons and Lovers" (1913), "The Rainbow" (1915), and "Women in Love" (1920) made him one of the most influential English writers of the 20th century. Much is said of Lawrence's fiction, but many have forgotten about his remarkable travel writing. "Twilight in Italy" is a small book of travel essays, worth reading for the light they throw on the context of Lawrence's work. The novel takes us on a foot tour of the Alps all the way down into the Verdant Gardens and the sun-soaked plazas of Italy. Lawrence gives us small stories here and there that not only share a sense of place, but also relate the experience of a real traveler.

In the first book to take D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems as its starting point, Bethan Jones adopts a broadly intertextual approach to explore key aspects of Lawrence's late style. The evolution and meaning of the poems are considered in relation to Lawrence's prose works of this period, including Sketches of Etruscan Places, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Apocalypse. More broadly, Jones shows that Lawrence's late works are products of a complex process of textual assimilation, as she uncovers the importance of Lawrence's reading in mythology, cosmology, primitivism, mysticism, astronomy, and astrology. The result is a book that highlights the richness and diversity of his poetic output, also prioritizing the masterpieces of Lawrence's mature style which are as accomplished as anything produced by his Modernist contemporaries.

Written after the First World War when he was living in Sicily, Sea and Sardinia records Lawrence's journey to Sardinia and back in January 1921. It reveals his response to a new landscape and people and his ability to transmute the spirit of place into literary art. Like his other travel writings the book is also a shrewd inquiry into the political and social values of an era which saw the rise of communism and fascism. On one level an indictment of contemporary materialism, Sea and Sardinia is nevertheless an optimistic book, celebrating the creativity of the human spirit and seeking in the fundamental laws which governed human nature in the past fresh inspiration for the present. This 1997 edition restores censored passages and corrects corrupt textual readings to reveal for the first time the book Lawrence himself called 'a marvel of veracity'.