Rome, Naples and Florence

The book of travel essays «Rome, Naples and Florence» hardly resembles a conventional guidebook. «Baron de Stendhal, a cavalry officer», the name listed on the cover of the first edition (1817), did not care too much about providing his readers with detailed instructions on which paths to take and which sights to admire under the blessed sky of Italy.
However, his book contained something else – the Italians, people about whom most authors of countless guidebooks and travel essays remained silent. With the skill of a magnificent novelist (not yet revealed to the world at that time), in a hundred captivating anecdotes where the names of the classics are constantly encountered, Stendhal creates a rich and lively portrait of Italian society. And the observation of local customs becomes for the author a means to better understand how this dearly loved country lives, what grants its celebrated composers the ability to create such beautiful music, its singers the skill to perform their arias with such feeling, and its artists to amaze the world with works that captivate the audience for many centuries.