Mapped
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
A young Englishwoman on the Grand Tour is unsettled by Florence and by a fellow guest at her pension, and the feeling follows her home. Part One maps the real city: a pension on the Arno embankment, the church of Santa Croce, the Piazza della Signoria where she faints, and the violet-covered slopes at Fiesole. Part Two moves to the Surrey hills near Dorking, mapped as scenes outside the setting.
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Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
An ageing German writer travels south for rest and is caught by the beauty of a boy he never speaks to, staying on as a cholera the city hushes up spreads through the summer. The map crosses the lagoon from the San Marco waterfront to the Lido, the barrier island of grand hotels and sea baths, and back into the sultry, sirocco-laden alleys of the old city.
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History: A Novel
Elsa Morante
In wartime and postwar Rome, Ida Ramundo, a timid half-Jewish widowed schoolteacher, is raped by a young German soldier and bears a son, Useppe, and mother and child struggle to survive through bombing, deportation, hunger and the black market as 'History' grinds the powerless underfoot. Morante's great anti-war novel maps a real Rome: the poor quarter of San Lorenzo and its bombing, the Jewish Ghetto and its deportation, the refugee shelters, and the ravaged city where innocence cannot last.
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History (La Storia)
Elsa Morante
Morante's wartime and post-war Rome, from 1941 to 1947, seen from the poor quarters rather than the palaces. A half-Jewish schoolteacher and her small son move from the tenements of San Lorenzo through the rubble of the Allied bombing to a shelter on the city's rural edge, past the ghetto emptied in October 1943 and out to Testaccio. The map runs from the San Lorenzo district by the Verano cemetery, southwest to the old Jewish quarter and Testaccio, and northeast to the barracks of Pietralata.
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Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar
An ageing emperor writes to his heir, taking the measure of a life spent building. The map holds the monuments Hadrian left standing in Rome: the Pantheon he rebuilt and the great drum of his own mausoleum by the Tiber. It reaches east to his villa at Tibur and, on his memory's longer excursions, to the Athens he adorned and the Nile where Antinous drowned.
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My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
Ferrante's neighbourhood, the rione, is drawn from the real Rione Luzzatti on the eastern edge of Naples: a poor 1930s housing estate hemmed by the railway, with its stradone, its parish church and the tunnel out to the ponds. From there the map runs west to the wealthier centre, the elegant streets around Via Chiaia and Piazza dei Martiri, and out across the bay to Ischia.
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Quo Vadis
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Nero's Rome in 64 AD, and the fire that destroys it. The Palatine palace, the Circus Maximus quarter where the flames begin, the Circus of Nero on the Vatican Field where the Christians are burned, the Mamertine prison, and the Appian Way, where the risen Christ meets Peter fleeing the city. Sienkiewicz built the ancient city from the monuments that still stand, and it brings Rome into the atlas.
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Romola
George Eliot
Eliot's Florence of the 1490s, researched to the stone. The Mercato Vecchio where the book opens, the Duomo and its Baptistery, the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno, San Marco where Savonarola is prior, the Piazza della Signoria of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and the Via de' Bardi in Oltrarno where the blind scholar Bardo lives with his daughter Romola. It brings George Eliot into the atlas, and a second Florence four centuries before A Room with a View.
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The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal
A young nobleman crosses Napoleonic Europe and the intrigues of a tiny Italian court. The map runs across northern Italy: Milan under the French, the family castle on Lake Como, and the little despotic state of Parma with its citadel prison, where the story ends in a monastery. One scene falls far outside the setting, at Waterloo in Belgium, where the hero wanders the battle without ever grasping it.
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The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
The frame of the hundred tales, set in and just outside Florence in the plague year of 1348. The death-dealing pestilence empties the city; seven young ladies meet by chance in the church of Santa Maria Novella and resolve to flee; with three young men they retire two short miles into the hills toward Fiesole, to a villa traditionally identified with Poggio Gherardo; from there they wander to the secluded Valley of the Ladies; and at the end the company returns to Santa Maria Novella, whence it set out. The hundred tales roam all of Europe, but the setting the map fixes is this Florentine frame, the ground of the greatest book of the Italian Middle Ages.
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The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
The frame of the novel is a bombed-out villa in the Tuscan hills as the war in Italy ends: a nurse, a burned man, a thief and a sapper hold together in the ruins of a former nunnery above Florence. The map centres on Villa San Girolamo at Fiesole and the city below, and reaches out to the Egyptian and Libyan desert the patient remembers.
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The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Giorgio Bassani
In Ferrara at the end of the 1930s, the narrator, a young Jewish man, is drawn into the walled world of the aristocratic Finzi-Contini family and their vast private garden, where he falls hopelessly in love with the elusive Micòl as the fascist race laws close a ring around them all. Bassani maps his own city: the great garden behind the walls off Corso Ercole I d'Este, the ramparts the young people cycle along, the synagogue on Via Mazzini, and the monumental Jewish cemetery where the book begins and the family's tomb waits.
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The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Lampedusa maps the end of aristocratic Sicily onto the real island his own family ruled. As Garibaldi lands at Marsala in 1860 and the old order falls, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, moves between his Palermo palace and the family's dusty inland estate of Donnafugata, drawn from the Tomasi towns of Palma di Montechiaro and Santa Margherita di Belice. The map is western Sicily, from the capital to the sun-struck interior.
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The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
In 1327 the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his young novice Adso arrive at a rich Benedictine abbey in the mountains of northern Italy, where a series of deaths draws them into a labyrinthine library and a deadly secret about a forbidden book. Eco sets his medieval murder mystery at an unnamed monastery in the Ligurian Apennines: the scriptorium where the monks illuminate manuscripts, the great fortress-library of the Aedificium, the church and grounds, and the Inquisition that arrives to twist the search for truth.
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