Emerson in Italy

In 1832 a melancholy young man with weak lungs set sail from Boston on Christmas Day, en route to Malta and points beyond. He was Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A rough crossing invigorated him, and his first sight of Europe overwhelmed him with its beauty. He filled his hands and hat with flowers in Sicily, rejoiced in Rome's "wilderness of marble" (and was scathing about his compatriots who found the Colosseum "a very nice place").

The "millinery & imbecility" of Catholicism at first aroused his scorn, but he was soon moved by the beauty of the churches. In Florence he reflected, "And all is Italian; not a house, not a shed, not a field that the eye can for a moment imagine being American."   Heights he loved, and scrambled up all that he encountered-Taormina, Monreale, Vesuvius, the cupola of St. Peter's, Giotto's tower, the campanile in Venice, the cathedral in Milan, best of all a colossal statue near Florence ("I got up into his neck and looked out of his ear").

But it was the moral heights he sought most avidly. "I thought," he wrote, "how always we are beginning to live, & how perfectly practicable at all times is the sublime part of life, the high hours, for which all the rest are given."  For him, Italy was the awakening of true vision.

That true vision is a mark of the late Evelyn Hofer's luminous photographs. The distant hills, the gardens and courtyards, pavements and bridges, cloisters and statues, all are invested with a sense of time arrested and intensified, of a raptly listening silence. Text and photographs of Emerson in Italy, by Evelyn Hofer and the scholar Evelyn Barish, are beautifully married.