Douglas called Old Calabria “that full-bodied book,” and others have said it’s the work that “best displays the broad ranges of his remarkable style and personality.” To Calabria-ophiles, though, Douglas’s book may strike a bit of a harsh chord as he describes the people and culture of southern Italy with his trademark arrogance. He tempers these descriptions, though, with much praise for southern Italy, from its beauty to its resilience despite hardships: "Ages of oppression and misrule have passed over their heads; sun and rain with all their caprice, have been kinder friends to them than their earthly masters." A timeless treasure, Old Calabria offers a well-researched, historical perspective of this little known region during the early 20th century.

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Product Description

An account of Norman Douglas's travels from village to village in Southern Italy around the turn of the century. From Gargano to Aspromonte, the natives - and even the dogs, are treated with a certain disdain as un-British comic types.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1306463 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 325 pages

Review
'One of the most entertaining literary characters of his age, always unexpected. He lived and died an unpenitent nonconformist.' - The Evening Standard; 'Douglas is an excellent writer of works of travel: he has the necessary independence of mind, his loneliness, the face that gives nothing away. Old Calabria is a classic. His eye wanders from the road into the generalities of history and religion...but he never misses the precise contours of the country.' - The New Statesman; 'Almost everything a newcomer can require is here: Douglas turns easily from legend to natural history, natural history to notes on local wine..;' - Graham Greene, on Footnote on Capri, Sunday Times

About the Author
Norman Douglas was born in 1868 and was educated in England, Germany and France. He entered the diplomatic service in 1894 but was granted extended leave in 1896 to avoid a scandal. He settled in Italy and began to write seriously. Siren Land was published in 1911, Fountains in the Sand in 1912 and Old Calabria in 1915. Publication of South Wind in 1917 established his reputation but after this success he became and exile, living in Italy and travelling in India and Africa. He returned to England in 1942 but spent the last five years of his life in Capri, dying in 1952.

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Customer Reviews

Old Calabria Revisited
'Old Calabria' is a travelogue reporting a British aristocrat's journey to Southern Italy and Calabria at the turn of the 20th century. For readers interested in Calabria, its real value lies in its depiction of how Southern Italy must have appeared to a foreigner's eyes at the time. Aside from the literary ability of the author, the book's subsequent success has depended more from the paucity of other accounts on Calabria in English than for any other intrinsic merit. Indeed, the book is much more interesting as an account of how Calabria has been represented by foreigners. There are a number of other accounts by English speakers on Calabria that are more nuanced and therefore more interesting. 'Old Calabria' reveals more about the common prejudices held by educated English speakers on Calabria than the region itself. In this book Norman Douglas perpetuates a number of mythologies regarding the South of Italy that are still current today as exoticising motifs, both in the negative and the positive: the "wildness" and "impenetrability" of Calabria, its deployment as a borderland between the great constructs called "Orient" and the "West" and so forth. For those people of Calabrian origins who have read the book in search of a sense of identity and feelings of self worth, this book may have loomed the larger, the greater their actual alienation from their origins. Rather than bringing them closer to an understanding of their identities, I would argue that the book has distanced them even further. It is through the very discourses that books such as these have perpetuated and legitimated in the English speaking world, that diasporic Calabrians have been alienated from themselves.

Old Calabria
The book was not as I expected and rather dated in content, so it was no help to me in my current search for information on Calabria. I returned the book according to the credit guidelines from Amazon but did not receive a credit.

Ann Garland