The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books)

The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (Banner Books)

Elizabeth Spencer

Language: English

Pages: 144

ISBN: B004TLPO66

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Elizabeth Spencer is captivated by Italy. For her it has been a second home. A one-time resident who returns there, this native-born Mississippian has found Italy to be an enchanting land whose culture lends itself powerfully to her artistic vision.

Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Her American characters encounter but never quite wholly adjust to the mysteries of the Italian mores. Collected here in one volume are Spencer's six Italian tales. Their plots are so alluring and enigmatic that Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister contrasts of dark and light.

Spencer is grounded in two bases-Italy and the American South. Her characters too, mostly Southerners, rove in search of connection and fulfillment.

In The Light in the Piazza (a novella which has become both Spencer's signature piece and a Hollywood film) a stranger from North Carolina, traveling with her beautiful daughter, encounters the intoxicating beauty of sunlit Florence and discovers a deep conflict in the moral dilemma it presents. "I think this work has great charm," Spencer has said, "and it probably is the real thing, a work written under great compulsion, while I was under the spell of Italy. But it took me, all told, about a month to write."

In Knights and Dragons (another novella and a companion piece to The Light in the Piazza) an American woman in Rome and Venice struggles for release from her husband's sinister control over her. Spencer sets this tale in the cold and wintry dark and here portrays the other face of Italy. In "The Cousins," "The Pincian Gate," "The White Azalea," and "The Visit," Spencer shows the exceptional artistry that has merited acclaim for her as one of America's first-class writers of the short story.

Pereira Maintains

Listen to My Voice

Conjugal Love

Frommer's Florence, Tuscany and Umbria (Frommer's Complete Guides)

Viper: A Commissario Ricciardi Mystery (Commissario Ricciardi, Book 6)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Halted, squinting in the strong sun. Judy dared not look at Bill. She had seen him at many other rungs of the ladder, looking both fearful and hopeful, both nervous and brave, in desperate proportions only Bill could concoct, and her heart had gone out to him. But now, as he confronted the Great Man at last, she looked elsewhere. She knew that he was transferring his glass to his left hand; she knew that his grasp would be damp, shaky, and cold. Almost as much as for Bill, however, Judy was.

Almost laughed—a letter. She recognized the heavy black slant of the writing and slowly, the laugh fading, slit it open. To her surprise the envelope was empty. There was nothing in it at all. He had probably meant to put a clipping in; it was a natural mistake, she thought, but some sort of menace was what she felt, being permanently lodged in the mind of a person whose love had turned to rejection. “Forget it,” Hartwell had advised her. “Everybody has something to forget.” But, alas, she was.

News and he had done all the decent things. Whereupon she looked at him, reflectively, through the sun, and all the fabric of his fantasy crumbled. At least in the warm intelligent effigy of the flesh she was still there and still able to get through to him. She was all but pointing out to him that he didn’t really know, how could he know just how it was? It was inhuman; it was monstrous—that was the first thing to know. Therefore, who was to say what she had or hadn’t had the right to do about.

Desperation. She never seemed very well. If a vote of sympathy was taken, she’d get mine.” They had taken Rita Wilbourne for a drive one day to Tivoli—he and his wife—and had discovered near there in the low mountains a meadow full of flowers. It was as close to a miracle as they could have hoped for, for it was misty when they left Rome and raining when they returned, but here she grew excited and jumped out of the car and walked out into the sun. Hartwell and his wife Grace sat in the car and.

Her where it had all happened, she had signed the papers at Colonna’s on the Piazza del Popolo and heard how the gun’s roar faded along with the crash of the leaves. “That isn’t good enough!” said Hartwell, but her gray regard upon him was simply accidental, like meeting the eyes in a painting. So there was no way around her. I’ll go myself, thought Hartwell, halfway down the Scotch. In the name of humanity somebody had to, and it seemed, for one sustained, sustaining moment, that he actually.

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