Books in Brief: The Hill Towns of Italy

The Hill Towns of Italy, photographs by Richard Kauffman, text by Carol Field (Dutton, 100 pp., $35)

OF PHOTOGRAPH BOOKS of Italy there is no end; nor should there be, when they are as beautifully conceived and produced as The Hill Towns of Italy, which contains 64 pages of four-color photographs as well as an informative text. Strictly speaking, “hill towns” refers to those of Tuscany and Umbria, which are in fact the only regions covered. Only? Tuscany and Umbria comprise a universe, and who that has been blessed to know their terrain can ever think of it as anything less than a holy land? As in the Sistine “Creation of Adam,” here the hand of God and the hand of man seem to meet at their most gracious and creative, in landscape, architecture, and art that bear witness as permanently as anything physical possibly can to a vision of felicity, to proportion, humanity, piety, and beatitude. Here, even tourism turns inevitably into pilgrimage, or perhaps reveals its real existential root and goal as pilgrimage; and the wanderings of modern people, like those of Odysseus, seem while in this landscape to be nearing home: ‘’la via, la vita, e la verita.” For here we see farmhouses, villas, palazzi, and cathedrals with the most satisfying proportions and dispositions ever achieved by the human hand and eye. We are constantly reminded of an era in which energy, craft, invention, skill, and art were popularly alive and fruitful, before affect was withdrawn from work, the tool became more competent than the workman, and “grey truth” became our “painted toy,” putting the marks of the beast and its “hideous strength” on our industrial and commercial landscape. The photographer, Richard Kauffman, clearly aspires to the richest and most romantically artistic conceptions— no ancient-modern contrasts, no shock tactics as in the photographs of Art and Culture of Italy: Too Late to Be Saved? Kauffman richly succeeds in depicting the glorious, almost heart-rending loveliness of these most beautiful of small cities. Christian humanism still haunts the landscape, which bears a distinct and irreducible spiritual imprint. Those who love this region cannot help but quibble with some of the photographic choices in this book: Why not show Urbino, just over the border in the Marches and, with Assisi, the loveliest hill town of them all? Why show Vol terra, and not the far lovelier Massa Marittima? And Todi is not well served. But this is only a quibble rather than a serious criticism of a gorgeously produced book that catches some of the eternity, and some of the beatitude, of the most poignantly felicitous countryside and noble cityscape in the world.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

Featured Tags

The Hill Towns of Italy, photographs by Richard Kauffman, text by Carol Field (Dutton, 100 pp., $35)

OF PHOTOGRAPH BOOKS of Italy there is no end; nor should there be, when they are as beautifully conceived and produced as The Hill Towns of Italy, which contains 64 pages of four-color photographs as well as an informative text. Strictly speaking, “hill towns” refers to those of Tuscany and Umbria, which are in fact the only regions covered. Only? Tuscany and Umbria comprise a universe, and who that has been blessed to know their terrain can ever think of it as anything less than a holy land? As in the Sistine “Creation of Adam,” here the hand of God and the hand of man seem to meet at their most gracious and creative, in landscape, architecture, and art that bear witness as permanently as anything physical possibly can to a vision of felicity, to proportion, humanity, piety, and beatitude. Here, even tourism turns inevitably into pilgrimage, or perhaps reveals its real existential root and goal as pilgrimage; and the wanderings of modern people, like those of Odysseus, seem while in this landscape to be nearing home: ‘’la via, la vita, e la verita.” For here we see farmhouses, villas, palazzi, and cathedrals with the most satisfying proportions and dispositions ever achieved by the human hand and eye. We are constantly reminded of an era in which energy, craft, invention, skill, and art were popularly alive and fruitful, before affect was withdrawn from work, the tool became more competent than the workman, and “grey truth” became our “painted toy,” putting the marks of the beast and its “hideous strength” on our industrial and commercial landscape. The photographer, Richard Kauffman, clearly aspires to the richest and most romantically artistic conceptions— no ancient-modern contrasts, no shock tactics as in the photographs of Art and Culture of Italy: Too Late to Be Saved? Kauffman richly succeeds in depicting the glorious, almost heart-rending loveliness of these most beautiful of small cities. Christian humanism still haunts the landscape, which bears a distinct and irreducible spiritual imprint. Those who love this region cannot help but quibble with some of the photographic choices in this book: Why not show Urbino, just over the border in the Marches and, with Assisi, the loveliest hill town of them all? Why show Vol terra, and not the far lovelier Massa Marittima? And Todi is not well served. But this is only a quibble rather than a serious criticism of a gorgeously produced book that catches some of the eternity, and some of the beatitude, of the most poignantly felicitous countryside and noble cityscape in the world.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).