BEYOND THE ALPS: A Summer in the Italian Hill Towns

This has a dual purpose- a dual impact on the reader. For it starts out to be what the title suggests, an enchanted sojourn in the little known Italian hill towns. The familiar ones are here:- Perugia, Assissi, San Gimigniano, Siena, Orvieto. But in between and on side roads, little travelled, the Coates and their knowledgeable companion-guide, sought out tiny villages from which artists whose work they had encountered had come. And the whole turns out to be- in almost as great a degree- a generous course in little traveled roads of art history and biography. And so the past and the present are interwoven and the contagious enthusiasm for this leisurely getting to know the hill towns persuades one to go and do likewise. There's a sensitive appreciation of the village folk - of the architecture and the planning that have brought towns into present being - of the known and the unexpected treasure trove- and of a way of life, shared at the slow pace of their wandering. Illustrated with photographs.