Wild Italy

Say the word Italy, and a scene lights up in the mind: a cafe table in St Mark's Square, perhaps, a Renaissance fresco, a Tuscan villa on a hilltop. There are many books about these things. In Wild Italy, Tim Jepson takes a different tack, leaving the well-worn tourist haunts behind him in search of fresher pleasures. He explores the whole country from its Alp-studded waist to its distant toe kicking the football of Sicily towards Africa. Like an unhurried lover, he works his way down thigh and shin, following the line of the Apennines, locating the pressure points between continental and peninsular Italy, pinching to see where the prosperous north gives way to the Mediterranean south, looking for those last innocent stretches of littoral, down one side and up the other, where the bathers have not set up their parasols. Having lived in Rome and trekked the entire peninsula, he knows the secret places that are as oxygen to a suffocating man after the murderous drive through the suburbs of Milan or Naples. He has picked out the loveliest spots in Sicily and Sardinia and plotted the last few pinpricks of Italian territory, the scattered islands off the Tunisian coast which are some of the most isolated and primitive places in Europe. As well as having an extensive knowledge of wild places, he also has the ability to write about them with passion. 'One view of a cypress tree or stone farm-house and we are entranced,' he writes, 'overcome by that longing for the warm south which Icelanders describe nicely as "the need for figs".'