SOUTH OF ROME: A Spring and Summer in Southern Italy and Sicily

This is an urbane, unpretentious, pleasantly desultory and personalized view of Italy, south of Rome, down to the tip of the boot. From Naples, Paestum, Pompeii and ""climactically"" Vesuvius, through fishing villages and towns on the Crusaders' coast with their Norman and Saracen imprint, to Sicily where ""everything... is always a little bit more so,"" this covers a less traveled terrain. There are piazzas and palazzos, chapels, churches and temples, ruins and relics, villas and castles; the emphasis is pictorial, historical and aesthetic-- the art and architecture of the past, and in the present, poverty, backwardness and often ""unrelieved desolation."" Not in any sense a formal guide (no hotels, no restaurants, no shops), it is low-keyed in tone, leisurely in manner, and presumably will be illustrated with photographs to heighten the visual emphasis of the text.