Nietzsche in Italy

Description

For fifteen years, after his first visit to the country in1876, Nietzsche was repeatedly and irresistibly drawn back to Italy's climate and lifestyle. It was there that he composed his most famous works, including Thus Spake Zarathustra and Ecce Homo. This classic biography follows the troubled philosopher from Rome, to Florence, via Venice, Sorrento, Genoa, Sicily and finally to the tragic denouement in Turin, the city in which Nietzsche found a final measure of contentment before his irretrievable collapse. Endlessly fascinating and highly readable, Nietzsche in Italy will enthrall anyone interested in Nietzsche's relationship with the country that enriched his soul more than any other.

Born in Berlin in 1881 to a Prussian aristocratic family with Huguenot ancestry, Guy de Pourtales passed his childhood and youth in Geneva, Vevey and Neuchatel. He moved to Paris to study literature at the Sorbonne, married a Frenchwoman and became a French citizen before fighting on the French side during the First World War . After the war, Pourtales developed tuberculosis, and while convalescing wrote a series of popular novels and biographies.He also formed rich and lasting contacts with luminaries in the French literary community, including Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Romain Rolland, Jules Supervielle as well as pro-French German language writers and poets such as Zweig and Rainer Maria Rilke. He published Nietzsche in Italy in 1929. It has never been out of print in France but has never been translated into English until now. Pourtales finally succumbed to his illness in 1941.

'Outstanding... Nietzsche in Italy by the German-born Swiss essayist and biographer Guy de Pourtals (1881-1941), freshly translated by Stone, remains remarkably penetrating in its interpretation of Nietzsche's thought' - New Statesman