Italian Neighbors: Or, A Lapsed Anglo-Saxon in Verona - Softcover

Parks, Tim

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449908186 ISBN 13: 9780449908181

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1993

Synopsis

Tim Parks and his wife, Rita, came to their flat on the aging, eccentric Via Colombare in Montecchio twelve years ago for a short stay. There was trouble from the moment they moved in--under cover of night--and it has gone delightfully up and down hill ever since. In this amusing and loving tribute to the glorious country he has embraced, British novelist Tim Parks shares his secrets of survival, tales of the unexpected, and treasured friendships with new-found friends and Italian neighbors.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"One of the most delightful travelogues imaginable...So vivid, so packed with delectable details, that it serves...as a more than decent substitute for the real thing."--LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

From Kirkus Reviews:

Parks, a lively English novelist (Goodness, 1991, etc.), plunges us into the passionate but genial world of his Italian neighbors on the Via Colombare in a village south of Verona. Be warned: to enjoy Peter Mayle's books on Provence, you need never have been there, while Parks draws you so intimately into life with his bubbling but blinkered and edgy Italians that some hands-on experience with Italy would help for full enjoyment of his pages. Parks and his pregnant wife, Rita, in minor peril from their first day, enter their new apartment and are attacked by a shouting madwoman who claims that the apartment was built for her by its late tenant. The Veronese summer stifles life until the first midnight breeze (which carries mosquitos with it into the bedroom), and the hunting dog Vega--kept ever outdoors in the backyard--howls and scrabbles the whole night through. Every night. Parks describes life at the pasticcer a and what drinks one may drink during various hours of the day without being sneered at as a village idiot. On the Via Colombare, peasant life meets urban, and one's gardening smarts are open to deep derision or mild approval. Buildings must be earthquake-proof, with ceramic-on-concrete floors that carry the sound of a dropped coin or a toilet flush in the night like an act of terrorism ringing everywhere. So it goes--and, after ten years, Parks is still there. Always zestful, sometimes gripping--but perhaps mostly for those who remember winter chestnuts toasting over a coal brazier. Much verve. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0449908186
• ISBN 13: 9780449908181
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288