Undertaking a peripatetic pilgrimage that is equal parts a daily description of a 200-kilometre walk from the wounded mountain of La Verna to the tortured river in Assisi, and an examination of the debt owed to Italy in terms of ecocultural and environmental scholarship, this book provides an innovative addition to the nascent field of ecocritical narrative scholarship. Through a process that has been referred to as “deep-travel“ or “mind-walking,” the text fulsomely reviews how time spent in Italy influenced the writings of notable North American environmental historians, geographers, scientists, nature writers, landscape architects, and restoration theorists about the conception and manipulation of the natural world. This literary field study highlights how the phenomenological co-traversing of texts and trails can be a valued methodology for undertaking environmental criticism.

Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

"Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh’s Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John Elder’s poetic meditations on land and life demonstrate that only by searching beyond our familiar boundaries can we discover better ways of living back at home."—Marcus Hall, author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration "This collaboration—between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive—is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I’ve ever read. It will be a classic."—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature "Elder’s impassioned pilgrimage shows us how to delight in messy wilderness, to secure a curative habitation of the world, and, with Marsh, to lend ecological nous to our gravest task: knowing ourselves and respecting one another. Let the maple seeds and olive stones of Elder’s visionary harvest restore to us a reflective and redemptory future."—from the foreword by David Lowenthal The pivotal figure in Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa is the nineteenth-century diplomat and writer George Perkins Marsh, generally regarded as America’s first environmentalist. Like Elder, Marsh was a Vermonter, and his diplomatic career took him for some years to Italy, where, witnessing the ecological devastation wrought upon the landscape by runaway deforestation and the plundering of other natural resources, he was moved to produce his famous manifesto, Man and Nature. Marsh drew parallels between the despoiled Italian environment and his home landscape of Vermont, warning that the latter was vulnerable to ecological woes of a similar magnitude if not carefully maintained and protected. In short, his was a prescient voice for stewardship. Elder follows in Marsh’s footsteps along a trajectory running from Vermont to Italy, and at length fetches up at the managed forest of Vallombrosa. Punctuated throughout with learned and genial considerations of the poetry of Wordsworth, Basho, Dante, and Frost, Elder’s narrative takes up issues of sustainability as practiced locally, reports on family doings, and returns finally—as did Marsh’s—to Vermont, where he measures traditional stewardship values against more aggressive conservation-oriented measures such as the expansion of wilderness areas. John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, is the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - waterpower - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.

Just as the restoration of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment sparked enormous controversy in the art world, so are environmental restorationists intensely divided when it comes to finding ways to rehabilitate damaged ecosystems. Although environmental restoration is quickly becoming a widespread pursuit, debate over the methods and goals of this endeavor often halts progress. The same question confronts artistic and environmental restorationists: Which systems need restoring, and to what states should they be restored? In Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration, Marcus Hall explores the answer to this question while offering an alternative to the usual narrative of humans disrupting and spoiling the earth. Hall’s purpose is not to deny that humans have done lasting damage but to show that those who believed in restoration did not always agree on what they wanted to restore, or how, or to what form. With guidance from the pioneer conservationist George Perkins Marsh, the reader travels between the United States and Italy to see that restoration has taken many forms over the past two hundred years, from maintaining and repairing, to gardening and naturalizing. By contrasting land management in these two countries and elsewhere, Earth Repair clarifies different meanings of restoration, shows how such meanings have changed through time and place, and suggests how restorationists can apply these insights to their own practices.

An innovative environmental history of the chestnut tree and what it can tell us about the medieval history of Italy.

This is the ironic story of how Italian Renaissance and Baroque gardens encouraged the preservation of the American wilderness and ultimately fostered the creation of the world's first national park system. Told via Mitchell's sometimes disastrous and humorous travels - from the gardens of southern Italy up through Tuscany and the lake island gardens - the book is filled with history, folklore, myths, and legends of Western Europe, including a detailed history of the labyrinth, a common element in Renaissance gardens. In his attempt to understand the Italian garden in detail, Mitchell set out to create one on his own property - with a labyrinth.