Author(s): Harry Clifton

Travel Writing

The Irish poet Harry Clifton and his wife took up residence in an abandoned parish house in a village of the high Abruzzo, in the mountains of central Italy. Intending to write through the summer months, they remained an entire year. Against the immense backdrop of the Apennines, the tiny community, resistant alike to the Church and state, gradually revealed its tensions and its generosities. A silence descends in the autumn as visitors and emigrants return home and the village returns to its isolated self. Winter comes with an iron harshness, but it gives way to the gentle vividness of an Italian mountain spring. ON THE SPINE OF ITALY is a celebration of the physical life, of young marriage and the making of poetry, but above all of the resilience of a small village that is a microcosm not only of Italy, but of a moment in the whole life of Europe. Paperback (A-Format)