I’m going to Italy with Virginia Woolf. I’m sure we will have a wonderful time.
She accompanied me to Ireland a few years ago, and we had such fun that we are traveling together again.
Woolf was a great European traveler. Of course she traveled around England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but she also visited six other European countries. She spent time in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Greece, as well as Italy. She toured some of these countries more than once.
While in her twenties, she also made two trips to Turkey.
I got most of those facts from a wonderful book titled Travels with Virginia Woolf written by Jan Morris and first published in 1993. And it’s because of that book that I know whenever I am traveling in Woolf’s steps.
Morris scoured Woolf’s diaries and letters in preparation for writing her Woolf travelogue. Then she went one big step further. She visited some of Virginia’s favorite spots herself.
I expect to find Morris’s own observations most useful on my own Italian trip, for she has noted how the sights and scenes of present-day Italy do or don’t match up to what Woolf experienced during her seven trips to the country where she said she would “come to die.”
Right now, I have a photocopy of the 15-page “Italy” chapter in my carry-on bag. I plan to spend my eight-hour Alitalia flight highlighting the spots Woolf saw that I, too, will have a chance to see. I will let you know how they compare.
[…] more on Woolf’s travels, visit In Her Steps and check out Travels with Virginia Woolf (1993) by Jan […]
So glad this post has started a conversation about Virginia in Italy and beyond. I’m writing from Orvieto, a city she did not visit, which is sad, as I would have loved to read her impressions of this amazing place.
Margarida, thanks for telling us about her trip to Lisbon.
And Cecil, thanks so much for adding your thoughts about Italia in general and Venice in particular. If Venice were on my itinerary this trip, I would have made sure to bring Lello’s book, but I’m sure your tip will help others when they travel to that venerable city.
See you in Kentucky soon!
You lucky girl! Being an Italophile I’m green with envy. I know Virginia didn’t like Venice, which she visited at the end of her long honeymoon with Leonard in 1912, and stayed with Lytton at the Casa Frollo, a hotel on the Giudecca — but for me it’s one of the Great Good Places. I was first there in 1945, as a young soldier, and fell in love with the place. Virginia’s first visit was in 1904, with Gerald Duckworth and Vanessa. On that occasion she stayed at the prestigious Grand Hotel, on the Grand Canal. She wrote to Margery Snowdon that she was ‘bored to death with Venice, and very cross’, Venice was a ‘cage that depressed her . . . I found the gondolas mysterious and the sense of menace as they glided along the dead of night, nothing but thrilling . . . the gondoliers shouting and laughing beneath my window unbearably irritating; the lack of language humiliating; the Italians themselves incorrigibly dishonest, a beastly nation of beggars and cripples. Thank God, I say, I was born an Englishwoman’. I hope you didn’t fail to pack John Lello’s indispensible booklet The Bloomsbury Group in Venice, with its delightful illustrations by his wife Sanda.
Just to remind you that VW also visited Portugal. She stayed in Lisbon for two days. The hotel where she and her brother Adrian stayed is still there, right in the heart of Lisbon.Still the same only with a few changes.