Write Around the World with Richard E Grant
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- Episode
- Episode One - Italy
- Broadcast Info
- 2021 (59 mins)
- Description
- Book and travel lover Richard E Grant journeys to southern Italy, in the footsteps of great authors whose work was inspired by the country, its culture and history. Reading key passages from the books as he goes along, Richard learns about the lives and experiences of the authors. His journey gives him fresh insights into the people and diversity of the region and its distinctive and captivating landscapes. He also discovers examples where books have had a direct effect on the area’s prosperity. Starting in Naples, Richard explores the rich traditions and complex history of one of the oldest cities in the world, whose crumbling palazzi, vibrant street life and turbulent history have proved inspirational to many writers. Among them is Charles Dickens, whose 1846 travelogue ‘Pictures From Italy’ Dickens describes a city teeming with life, where superstition and a belief in miracles were the main survival tools for a people blighted by poverty and corruption. Richard finds that some of the spectacles and traditions described by Dickens are still thriving. For example, the famous religious ritual in which a vial of the blood of the city’s patron saint and protector the Catholic martyr San Gennaro miraculously turns to liquid three times a year. Inspired by the Smorfia, a famous local book that turns dreams into auspicious numbers, Richard tries his luck on the lottery which Dickens was fascinated to encounter for the first time in Naples. Despite its obvious charms Naples, also has a reputation for poverty, crime and corruption but over recent years the city has enjoyed a boom in tourism - due, in part to the enormous success of Elena Ferrante’s bestselling ‘My Brilliant Friend. Local guide and journalist Sophia Seymour accompanies Richard to some of the places brought to life by Ferrante. They visit the bustling market where the characters in My Brilliant Friend might have worked and, further off the beaten track, venture into the fascist housing blocks in the Rione Luzzati, the suburb where the two girls at the heart of the novel grow up in the 1950s under the shadow of the local Mafia. Naples is considered the birthplace of pizza largely thanks to the famous San Marzano tomatoes that grew on the fertile soil at the base of Vesuvius. In her memoir ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ the American author Elizabeth Gilbert described her epic journey following a bitter divorce. Her travels took her to Naples to find the perfect pizza. Grant visits the restaurant where finally her dreams came true. Norman Lewis’s classic account of his year spent as an intelligence officer for the allied forces ‘Naples 44’ offers a reminder of the city’s continued struggle with poverty and misfortune, not least living under the shadow of the great volcano Vesuvius which erupted during Lewis’s time here. Climbing Vesuvius Richard remembers both Lewis’s extraordinary account and Charles Dickens’s description of his expedition to the summit of the volcano. Looking into the crater, he stands on the spot where Dickens stood in 1845 with his clothes alight, having walked up the Vesuvius by night at a time when the volcano was going through a regular cycle of eruptions. South of Vesuvius, Richard travels to the city of Pompeii, famously destroyed by the volcano in 79AD. Here, informed by Robert Harris’s thriller ‘Pompeii’ he explores the remains of what once was a thriving Roman town. In the company of guide Francesca Del Vecchio, he visits key locations in Harris’s novel including the spot where the city’s water flowed from the region’s famous aqueduct. In the glamorous town of Positano, just 8 miles further south on the Amalfi coastline, Richard stays at the hotel where American crime writer Patricia Highsmith stayed in 1952 after a tempestuous journey through Europe with her girlfriend Ellen Blumenthal Hill. Looking out onto the beach from the balcony of her hotel room one morning, Highsmith was inspired to create her most famous character Tom Ripley as she watched ‘a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach’. Richard explores the aspirational appeal of Positano and how this fed into ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’. Travelling south to the Basilicata region, Richard’s final stop is the city of Matera, now a UNESCO world heritage site but just 80 years ago considered ‘the shame of Italy’. Here he looks at how the city’s fortunes were changed by Carlo Levi’s book ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’, an account of his time spent in the region when he was exiled by Mussolini’s government for anti-fascist activities during the 1930s. Levi discovered unimaginable poverty and a city where 20,000 people were living in caves dug into the rock, known as the Sassi. The publication of his book in 1945 resulted in the government moving the inhabitants of the Sassi into modern housing. Richard meets Antonio Nicoletti whose father grew up in the Sassi and stays in a cave hotel.
- Genre
- Literature; Architecture; Culture
How to cite this record
The Open University, "Write Around the World with Richard E Grant". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/239672 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)