Italy - A Love Affair

Overview and Issue

Two-part article on Dorothy Dunnett's fascination with Italy and its importance in stimulating plot points in her historical novels and modern JJ series. The article is breathtaking in revealing Dorothy's huge intellect, diverse friendships, passion for lifelong travel and continuous learning.

WG075 'There is a certain private delight in moving from the detailed study of a piece of 15th-century velvet, or a building or a painting, to the joys of the modern world....It is never enough. You must see the churches and mansions, study the paintings, and become acquainted with the sounds and the smells, the heat and the cold and the wet, the flowers, the birds and the trees. And it is only from the shops on the spot that you can easily buy facsimiles of the earliest maps of the city, or the local books in whatever language, that will provide the one telling detail you will not find anywhere else.'

'It is a nervous business as well, for you must be alert to every moment, watching, comparing, memorising. It is also hard on the feet, for despite the painstaking itineraries you will have prepared, there is always the unexpected adventure, the archway, the tunnel, the twist in the path that invites exploration. The result is, however, that you return with misconceptions cleared up, and prejudices often revised - although sometimes to make room for even better ones. I have personally grown very bad-tempered over the current addiction to Caravaggio. Give me Carpaccio, and I shall ask for no more. I was also unwise enough to be beguiled by della Robbia, and to compare my hero with one of his sexless porcelain angels. I believe that readers have been tramping through Italy ever since for the definitive Lymond.' (DD)

WG076
Dorothy talks of her excitement in finding so many Italianate examples outside of Italy as well as an amazing number of people and locations that laid the foundations for her novels. "I said I had a love affair with Italy. It's still going on. So what do I remember most, of all my travels, of all I have learned? Something romantic, but also intellectual; something modern but also ancient; something unique. Venice in carnival time, when opera and ballet, circus and drama combine under the skies, and the natural theatres of the piazze become supernatural theatres of music and light, with silver masks and flowing costumes passing over the bridges, and every canal filled with lamplit flotillas until the last moment of the last hour of the last night, when all vanishes into darkness and silence, save for the tolling of bells. To be revived and played again, the following year."

WG075 - The following is but a very small sample. Every paragraph is replete with names and locations.
Leonard Boden - artist friend of DD
Tito Gobbi
Cosimo di Giovanni de Medici - the "old Cossimo"
Piero Strozzi - Marshall of France
King Macbeth
Pope Leo - 1050AD

WG075 - The following is a very small sample of the places DD mentions. Every paragraph is replete with names and locations.

WG075
"It was the time of the matriarchal Strozzi family of Naples and Rome (and Bruges and Sicily and Spain) who were later to infiltrate the kingdom of France, and the Knights of St John, and tb come with an army to Scotland in 1548 in the person of Marshal of France, Piero Strozzi." (DD)