ETRURIA   Travel, History, and Itineraries in Central Italy
author: Mary Jane Cryan
publisher:  Etruria Editions,  2010   isbn  978 -88-9689-09-1
Price  12,00 euros  

No one writes more informatively and entertainingly about  Tuscia than Mary  Jane Cryan, American travel writer and local historian who has made her home in Italy for over four decades. Author of numerous historical-cultural guides and studies of this  corner of Northern Lazio renowned for its unspoiled natural environment, fascinating medieval villages, baroque gardens and Etruscan archaeological sites, Cryan takes a  deep map approach to her subject, exploring every inch of  her home turf to offer her readers a vertical time-slice of the area’s  history, legends, and  culture.  In her books of local lore, she revisits  well-known sites and discovers new ones off the beaten track, uncovers the secret significance of forgotten temples  and labyrinthine gardens, tastes her way through festivals and fairs, retraces  pilgrim journeys or aristocratic itineraries to bring her readers a vivid guide to this territory  and its colorful traditions.  Building on the research  which lay the groundwork for her previous books  Affreschi – Exploring Etruria,  Travels to Tuscany and Northern Lazio, Vetralla, The English Connection,   in her new book  Etruria  Travel History and Itineraries in Central Italy,  Cryan  expands her geographical focus slightly to include bordering areas of  Tuscany, and suggests several new  itineraries not mentioned in her previous books. The chapter Treasures includes lists of castles, historic and modern  gardens, nature preserves, unusual museums,    all ideal sites for excursions “fuori porta”  outside the gates of Rome for travelers eager to follow the road less traveled.

Cryan has a penchant for ferreting out documents relating to illustrious foreign residents and  visitors in the Tuscia from previous centuries , and in this new volume she includes selections from the letters of  Sophia Hawthorne, wife of Nathaniel, who describes in graphic detail the sights and odors experienced a trip through Tuscia in 1858.  While impressed with the sublime landscape,  the Hawthornes were taken aback by the  conditions of daily life they encountered.  Another intriguing chapter of the book   deals with the sort of mystery many  Porta Portese  aficionados dream of:  stumbling upon  artworks of value at  a flea market and tracing down their origins.   Cryan tells the story of how she acquired a set of eleven unsigned  eighteenth-century  drawings picked up at a market stall, and  how, through serendipity and sleuthing,  she managed to identify the artist and discover the circumstances in which they were made.  

From her princely home in Vetralla,  with its writing studio and library that any writer would envy, and its   terrace overlooking  the fertile hills crisscrossed with  roads where pilgrims, saints, soldiers, artists, and  noblemen once traveled at a more leisurely pace than ours,  and the fountains where they refreshed themselves,  Mary Jane Cryan shows us how every inch of  her adopted homeland is densely layered with stories, ghosts, ruins, fragments, begging to be remembered, to be read.    Vernon Lee, British writer,  friend to  Henry James, once remarked that we leave a bit of ourselves in the landscapes we love, which then becomes  part of the spirit of place.   Surely this is true of Mary Jane Cryan, who is now as much a part of Tuscia, as Tuscia is a part of her inner landscape.