num_pages: 192
description: In August 1936 a Hungarian writer in his mid-thirties arrives by train in Venice on a journey overshadowed by the coming war and charged with intense personal nostalgia. Aware that he might never again visit this land whose sites and scenes had once exercised a strange and terrifying power over his imagination he immerses himself in a stream of discoveries reappraisals and inevitable self-revelations. From Venice he traces the route taken by the Germanic invaders of old down to Ravenna to stand fulfilling a lifelong dream before the sacred mosaics of San Vitale.This journey into his private past brings Antal Szerb firmly and at times painfully up against an explosive present producing some memorable observations on the social wonders and existential horrors of Mussolini's new Roman Imperium.
language: English
title: The Third Tower: Journeys in Italy
publisher: Pushkin Press