2025 Readings 95

 As we passed through the Fort Lauderdale Airport on the way back from visiting Jack and Julie we had time to spend in the bookstore in Terminal 2, which would probably constitute the second best bookstore in Vermont (seriously, it was a nice little bookstore). While there I picked up a copy of Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy, which I owned at one time in the antediluvian past in a complete hardbound set of the works of Dickens (one of the many great gifts that my ex-wife Brenda bought me over the years). Sadly, all those books went the way of all flesh, and I don't really have that many actual, physical copies of Dickens left - and considering our upcoming plans I'm not going to be adding more on this side of the Atlantic. Still, I was happy to stumble across this book so I went ahead and picked it up.  It's essentially a travelogue that Dickens wrote on a vacation in Italy. I don't think it's great (and this is coming from a complete Dickens nut), but it's still interesting. When I think of what made Dickens a great writer I believe it was the slow evolution of his characters, and less his physical descriptions or quick snapshots, wo, with that in mind, I would argue that a travelogue didn't really play to his strength. Still, I liked it, and borrowed some of it for the epics books to serve as an introduction to a section. If you like Dickens or Italy, you should still give it a look.

Let us look back on Florence while we may, and when its shining dome is seen no more, go travelling through cheerful Tuscany with a bright remembrance of it, for Italy will be the fairer for the recollection. The summertime being come - and Genoa, and Milan, and the Lake of Como lying far behind us, and we resting at Faido, a Swiss village near the awful rocks and mountains, the everlasting snows and roaring cataracts of the Great St Gothard, hearing the Italian tongue for the last time on this journey - let us part from Italy with all its miseries and wrongs, affectionately, in our admiration of the beauties, natural and artificial, of which it is full to overflowing, and in our tenderness towards a people naturally well disposed and patient and sweet tempered. Years of neglect, oppression and misrule have been at work to change their nature and reduce their spirit: miserable jealousies fomented by petty princes to whom union was destruction and division strength have been a canker at the root of their nationality, and have barbarized their language, but the good that was in them ever is in them yet, and a noble people may be, one day, raised up from these ashes. Let us entertain that hope!

And let us not remember Italy the less regardfully because, in every fragment of her fallen temples and every stone of her deserted palaces and prisons, she helps to inculcate the lesson that the wheel of Time is rolling for an end - and that the world is, in all great essentials, better, gentler, more forbearing and more hopeful as it rolls!