Little Novels of Italy

Five Italian novellas of the Renaissance: a duchess, a poet, a knife, a bargain in a church porch. Hewlett was Keeper of the Land Revenue Records before The Forest Lovers made him famous in 1898; he wrote Italy as a place where beauty and murder are administrative facts, and his prose is deliberate, mannered and very much in command of itself. Fifty-seven plates by painters from Chardin to Munch extend the book's streets and squares, the civic spaces where Hewlett's beauty and murder are administrative facts.