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Pictures from Italy
Pictures from Italy
Nov 24, 2025 12:31 PM

Author:Charles Dickens,Kate Flint,Kate Flint

Pictures from Italy

'When Dickens has described something you see it for the rest of your life' George Orwell

In 1844, Charles Dickens took a break from novel writing to travel through Italy for almost a year, and Pictures from Italy is an illuminating account of his experiences there. He presents the country like a magic-lantern show, as vivid images ceaselessly appear before his - and his readers' - eyes. Italy's most famous sights are all to be found here - St Peter's in Rome, Naples with Vesuvius smouldering in the background, the fairytale buildings and canals of Venice - but Dickens's chronicle is not simply that of a tourist. Combining compelling travelogue with piercing social commentary, he portrays a nation of great contrasts: between grandiose buildings and squalid poverty, ancient monuments and everyday life, past and present.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Kate Flint

Reviews

History and legend combine in an epic recreation of the Troy myth

—— Conn Iggulden

David Gemmell carries us away to a four-cornered, wholly convincing cosmos, so masterfully done that the reader thinks, 'Ah this is what it was really like'

—— Steven Pressfield

Gripping and fast-paced, intelligent and intensely readable... should appeal to anyone who enjoys an action-packed historical epic

—— Joanne Harris

The loyalties and betrayals, the love and the hate, the endless, everlasting courage of the men - and the women - of both sides are brought to life in this vivid, inspirational recreation of the Troy myth

—— Manda Scott

'Gruesomely entertaining ... intellectually fascinating'

—— Daily Mail

'A tragi-comedy of elegant and unrelieved blackness'

—— Sunday Telegraph

'Erudite and compelling... Genuinely hard to put down'

—— Sunday Times

'Wilson has always been a brilliant storyteller, who ­- unlike many of his no less famous contemporaries - is incapable of ever writing a boring line... Masterly... Always enthralling... Here is a book one races through, so eager is one to know what happens next... In [Wilson's] hands, as in James's, each turn of the screw succeeds in intensifying the reader's unease'

—— Francis King , Literary Review
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