Product Description

In "The Italian year of Pilgrimage" List is the consummate tour guide who has distilled for us, in less than one hour's listening, the essence of the life, visual art and literature of Renaissance Italy, a tour that even today is de rigueur for the tourist who wants more out of this trip than a few fine souvenirs. There is the buoyancy of Salvator Rosa's Canzonetta as it could still be sung on the streets of Naples, the serenity and intensity of Rafael's "The Betrothal (of Mary and Joseph)," the somber meditation on Lorenzo de Medici's sepulcher in Florence. Further, of course, the great early vernacular poets, represented in respectively the monumental "Dante Fantasia" and three moving Petrarca's portraits of his great love, Beatrice. The "Vallée d'Obermann" from the First Year of Pilgrimage (Switzerland) laments: "I have experienced it all in that memorable night. I have … devoured ten years of my life."