14 h 33 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 14 h 33 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if the real adventure in Italy is questioning everything a traveler is supposed to admire?
In Italian Fantasies, Israel Zangwill explores Italy as a writer first and a tourist second. These travel essays follow a sharp, sympathetic observer who looks, thinks and jokes. Places matter, but so do the people who visit them—and the ideas they carry along.
This is no guidebook. Zangwill brings charm, irony and passion to an Italy where the past sits in the street. His attention moves between what he sees and what it makes him think. A joke may sit beside real emotion, while his questioning eye invites you to look beyond familiar admiration.
What you’ll discover
- A traveler with an ironic eye Meet a writer whose curiosity includes questioning the things everyone else seems to admire.
- Italy through its past Consider a country where the past remains part of what a visitor sees.
- Wit and passion share the page Enjoy essays that leave room for both a quick joke and a moment of feeling.
- People beyond the places Look at Italy's visitors as well as the places that draw their attention.
- A slower kind of journey Read one essay at a time, and give its distinctive tone space to settle.
Who will love it
Readers who love Italy and its painting, who enjoy witty arguments about faith, art and history, and who like a travel companion with strong opinions, sharp humour and a poet's eye for light and stone.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Beauty, faith and death meet at the Alps
- Museums turn living things into dead ones
- The living Christ is lost beneath the Cross
- The Carpenter's Wife and the cult of Mary
- Autocosms: every creature builds its own world
- Science, culture and tourism miss the whole truth
- Institutions and Magnificence betray their founders
- Power, truth and the past in Machiavelli and Lucrezia
- Travels in time, pictures, maps and Mazzini
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- 15-minute summary
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- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
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- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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25 languages, side by side
Read and hear Italienische Fantasien in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Italienische Fantasien
by Israel Zangwill · 1910
A Jewish novelist wanders Italy's churches, tombs and palaces and argues about saints, painters and rulers.
Challenging10–20 hours to read25 languages
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In short
What is a church worth if it forgets the living? Israel Zangwill asks this all across Italy, and he asks it with a laugh and a lump in the throat.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Beauty, faith and death meet at the Alps
Zangwill opens with a rhapsody. He crosses the Alps with baggage of dreams, poems and old histories. He loves the road from Sorrento to Amalfi, because beauty takes the winding way while science takes the short one.
Then the mood darkens. In Bologna he watches a Whitsun service where a child's red balloon floats up just as the Host is raised. He sees even the balloon as part of the holy celebration.
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What is Italian Fantasies about?
It is a collection of essays by Israel Zangwill about travel in Italy. Churches, tombs, pictures and monuments set off arguments about faith, science, art, power and history, written with humour and deep feeling.
Who wrote Italian Fantasies and when?
Israel Zangwill wrote it. The book began as three essays in Harper's Magazine in 1903 and 1904, and later essays were added. Zangwill died in 1926.
What does autocosm mean in this book?
Autocosm is Zangwill's own word for the private world every creature builds from a selection of the universe. Peoples and religions make autocosms too, and history is the clash between them.
The author
Israel Zangwill
1864–1926 · British novelist and playwright
Israel Zangwill was a British author born in London in 1864. He wrote novels, plays, and essays. His books include The Big Bow Mystery (1892) and Italian Fantasies (1910). He supported Zionism and later Jewish territorialism. He lived in England and died in Midhurst, Sussex, in 1926.
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