THE DREAM OF ARCADIA

This is a cook's tour of culture through Italy taken by famous American intellectuals over the past two centuries. Dedicating it to the last lover of Italy- Bernard Berenson, Van Wyck Brooks has put together a potpourri of renowned travelers from Benjamin West, Washington Irving, Marion Crawford, Margaret Fuller, the James brothers, Howells, to mention only a few famous names. No one of note who tarried with pleasure and profit in Italy is omitted- and a few famous Englishmen are thrown in for good measure, Ruskin, Shelley, Browning.... All in all, it is one of Brooks' lesser works, a rather superficial literary travelogue for which his pleasant and practised style, his familiar ease with great men, compensates to some degree.