The Venetian republic was then an Austrian possession, where it was said even the priests spied for Vienna. Howells’s professional obligations were to file an annual report on the traffic that passed through the port and to write occasionally to the ambassador and the State Department.

A born linguist – he spoke French, German, and Spanish – Howells learned Italian and explored the city, for what would turn out to be Venetian Life, a book that introduced American readers to the republic at sea. In a letter to his sister Annie, he wrote: “It is so quaint, so old, so beautiful, so sad…” Later he recalled: “The fact is, that in the course of time one becomes skeptical of one’s whole youth, and Venice had been a great part, a vital part of my youth.” Throughout his life, especially in the low moments, he would return to Italy and spoke the language of an expatriate, in being “torn between two homesicknesses: the longing for America, and the desire to stay in Italy…”

Tiring of the diplomatic life in 1864, Howells decided to return to the world of letters that he had discovered in Boston before sailing for Europe. (On a memorable trip there in 1860, at the age of 23, he met Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Longfellow.) First he and Elinor traveled the length of the Italian peninsula, so that Howells could collect material for Italian Journeys. They traveled west from Venice to Padua, crossed to Genoa through Ferrara and Bologna, and then took a boat, on rough seas, to Naples, Pompeii, Capri and Rome. It was an abbreviated version of the Grand Tour, not unlike the Italian travels of James Boswell, whose literary directness, everyday speech in his writing, and taste for travel would have appealed to Howells, the apostle of realism. Howells wrote: “I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life.” I can imagine him warming to Dr. Johnson.

As he did often in a literary career that spanned almost sixty years, Howells broke new ground with his trip across Italy. The newly unified country was unknown to American readers, largely seen in the context of its political turmoil – much the way the former states of Yugoslavia are written about today. What made the book celebrated is that he wrote about sacred Europe with the direct sensibility of someone who came of age setting type on the midwestern plains. Here is his first description of the Eternal City:

Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly – especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried.

The same style can be read today, in such irreverent writers as Paul Theroux and Bill Bryson, but Howells was among those who invented the form of travel narratives as personal confessions. In turn, it moved literature to something more impressionistic, as travel books were a rite of passage for emerging writers. Italian Journeys was Howells’s passport to literary fame. For the next fifty years he traveled the world’s literary salons, as if in a gondola.

To describe accurately Howells’s career after he comes home from his Italian travels would require a stage version of Ragtime, in which he plays the central role. He spent almost ten years as editor of the Atlantic, among the most influential magazines of the era. (During the Civil War Lincoln said that a favorable piece in the Atlantic was worth a dozen victories on the battlefield.) As its editor, Howells met everyone, nurtured their work, and left his mark on the literature of the age, in his ceaseless argument that writing should be without pretension. His editorial genius was his first-class temperament that warmed to other writers. As he was visiting England, a friend, Edmund Gosse, wrote: “W.D. Howells is over here, and we have seen a great deal of him. To know him is to love him: I think he is one of the most winning personalities I have ever met…with such a fund of genius and strength.”

No one admired Howells more than Twain. The two were almost brothers. Each shared an affection for the other’s travel writing. Howells loved Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, and Twain loved Italian Journeys. Later in his life, Twain wrote: “In forty years [Howells’s] English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities – clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing – he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.” Interestingly, Twain had little time for the novels of Henry James, of which he said to Howells: “I would rather be ‘damned to John Bunyan’s heaven' than finish reading The Bostonians.” But Howells had the accommodating gift of friendship, and he and Henry James were lifelong confidants, and saw each other when they could. James once attended a lecture at Harvard that Howells gave about a trip to Italy. Later James said that during the talk, when he closed his eyes, it was as if a window was opening on to Florence. Those windows are open here.

The Road to Rome from Venice

Leaving Venice

We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome.