Italian Journeys

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) – writer, critic and pioneer of the American realist school – was one of the most influential writers of American fiction during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A lifelong friend of Mark Twain and a contemporary of Hawthorne, Thoreau and Emerson, Howells’s own literary career took off with his novel, A Modern Instance but The Rise of Silas Lapham is his best-known. Widely acknowledged as the ‘American Dean of Letters', Howells was one of the first seven chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he later became president, and which instituted its Howells Medal for Fiction in 1915.

Matthew Stevenson is an American writer who lives in Switzerland. His Letters of Transit: Adventures and Encounters from America to the Pacific Isles is published by Tauris Parke Paperbacks. His most recent book is Remembering the Twentieth Century Limited. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, to which William Dean Howells contributed 335 articles between 1886 and 1920, notably for the lead column, known as the Editor’s Easy Chair.

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Italian Journeys

From Venice to Naples
and Beyond

William Dean Howells

Foreword by Matthew Stevenson

New paperback edition published in 2011 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
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Foreword Copyright © Matthew Stevenson, 2011

Cover image: Gondolas in Venice, 1908 (oil on canvas), Monet, Claude (1840–1926) / Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 84885 549 6
eISBN: 978 0 85773 153 1

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Contents

Foreword by Matthew Stevenson

The Road to Rome from Venice

Leaving Venice

From Padua to Ferrara

The Picturesque, the Improbable, and the Pathetic in Ferrara

Through Bologna to Genoa

Up and Down Genoa

By Sea from Genoa to Naples

Certain Things in Naples

A Day in Pompeii

A Half-hour at Herculaneum

Capri and Capriotes

The Protestant Ragged Schools at Naples

Between Rome and Naples

Roman Pearls

Forza Maggiore

At Padua

A Pilgrimage to Petrarch’s House at Arquà

A Visit to the Cimbri

Minor Travels

Pisa

The Ferrara Road

Trieste

Bassano

Possagno, Canova’s Birthplace

Como

Stopping at Vicenza, Verona, and Parma

Ducal Mantua

Foreword
by Matthew Stevenson

Who was William Dean Howells (1837–1920) and why is he the right person to take you around Italy?

In the last half century Howells has faded from literary awareness, remembered, if at all, for his novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and as a pioneer of realism in American fiction. English majors at American universities might recall his close friendship with Mark Twain. After that, for most, the Howells trail will grow cold. Who knows that someone so prominent in literary Boston, where Howells was editor of the Atlantic Monthly and wrote novels that explored domestic realities, had even visited Italy, let alone written books about its decadence and splendors?

Were I writing this preface a century earlier, Howells would need no introduction, either to American or British readers. In the late nineteenth century, he was the chairman of American letters, whose vast work as an editor, novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, critic, poet, and travel writer set the literary standards for the age. Such was his importance that when he denounced black walnut in one of his novels, it disappeared from fashionable American houses.

His literary cause was a form of democratic realism. In 1887, near the peak of his career, he said that fiction should “speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know – the language of unaffected people everywhere – and we believe that even its masterpieces will find a response in all readers.” Especially in English circles, he was quick to declare the independence of the American novel.

Judge a man by his friends, and look at those that liked and admired Howells. He and Mark Twain were best friends – Twain grew up in Missouri, Howells in Ohio, and, at least in after-dinner memories, they shared childhoods similar to that of Huck Finn. Howells also had enduring friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson (the New England essayist), Richard Henry Dana (Two Years Before the Mast), Henry James (both father and son, of the same name), Bret Harte (short stories), Matthew Arnold (the English critic), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the poet), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin). He promoted Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Among the young writers that he later encouraged and supported were Edith Wharton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Vachel Lindsay, and Robert Frost. Willa Cather attended his seventy-fifth birthday. Were you to have asked most of them who they considered to be America’s greatest writer, they likely would have nominated Howells. Well into the twentieth century, writers like Dreiser, Hemingway and Fitzgerald were experimenting with the forms that Howells had coined.

From 1870 to 1910, Howells was the gold standard of American letters, and the book that gained him this currency was his first, Italian Journeys, published in 1867. It was another long journey that took him from Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, to the summit of American letters. Growing up in a bookish although itinerant family, he spent his school years as a typesetter on his father’s newspaper and later worked as a reporter in Columbus.

In 1860, with the good fortune that would follow his literary career, he wrote a campaign biography of a candidate given little chance for victory in the presidential election: Abraham Lincoln. He wrote the book in less than a month, and even passed on the chance to meet the candidate in person (books, for Howells, were all about business). The biography resonated with Lincoln, and he appointed Howells to serve as the American consul in Venice, Italy, a position he took up in 1861.

Sailing for Europe, Howells left behind a sweetheart from Brattleboro, Vermont, Elinor Mead, who, after some torrid letters, joined him in marriage and in Italy. The newlyweds loved Venice. They lived on the Grand Canal and entertained visiting Americans.