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

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."

The first critical edition of D. H. Lawrence's 1912-16 essays. Lawrence left England for the first time in May 1912, and began to record his reactions to foreign cultures. In 1915 he amplified some of these essays and wrote others for Twilight in Italy (1916), his first travel book.

Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian Essays, or Etruscan Places, is a collection of travel writings by D. H. Lawrence, first published posthumously in 1932. In this book Lawrence contrasted the life affirming world of the Etruscans with the shabbiness of Benito Mussolini's Italy during the late 1920s. In preparing these essays, Lawrence travelled through the countryside of Tuscany with his friend Earl Brewster during the spring of 1927.

Sketches of Etruscan Places contains seven essays D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1927 after visiting several Etruscan cities in central Italy. Six were published posthumously in 1932 as Etruscan Places; 'The Florence Museum' is published for the first time here. Some appeared in magazines in Lawrence's lifetime, but he expressed a wish that they be published in a volume with the photographs he had collected; in fact, only twenty of the forty-five illustrations here reproduced with Lawrence's own captions were included in 1932. Eight essays about Florence and the Tuscan countryside form the second part of this volume. The texts have been established by checking manuscripts, typescripts, proofs and periodical and book publications. The introduction gives the genesis, publication, textual history and reception of the essays.

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.