In the summer of 1918, and recently arrived on the Italian front line, the eighteen-year-old Hemingway wrote a letter to a high-school friend back home in Oak Park, Illinois. It begins,

If this has all the hallmarks of a somewhat callow youthfulness, it also signals the very real dangers of Hemingway's situation then, to be quickly realized when, on 8 July, he was wounded by a combination of Austrian mortar fire and one of those machine guns he describes. This event would, of course, have lasting effect on him, recast in fictional form in the two novels and one of the short stories he set in Italy, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Across the River and into the Trees (1950) and “A Way You'll Never Be” (1933).

While the transnational scope of Hemingway's life and work – most especially in the cases of Europe, Cuba and Africa – is well known, it might be argued that critics have even now tended to underplay its importance. Thus his liking for Europe (and especially Spain) was intimately connected with his distaste for what he saw as the despoliation of nature in, and crass materialism of, twentieth-century American life. This accounts for the passage cut from Death in the Afternoon (1932) where he remembers the Michigan of his boyhood summers, an unspoiled rural environment now polluted by the effects of urban and suburban living, and covered over by the signs of a commercial and faceless mass culture:

So, too, he makes dismissive remarks in the published version of the book about America's “Y.M.C.A. and other institutions for clean living,” emphasizing the poverty of a materialistic and therapeutic culture, its “modern comforts,” and its “bathtub in every American home.”Footnote ³ Americans here, especially in their repression of any knowledge of, or “intelligent interest in” (235), the taboo subject of death are compared to the Spanish, whose attitude to that issue is seen as healthily mature; who are “interested in death and do not spend their lives avoiding the thought of it and hoping it does not exist only to discover it when they come to die” (233). Something similar is true in Hemingway's writings on Cuba and Africa. Here, and in both cases, he shows a keen interest in alternative systems of religious belief, of spiritual and emotional sustenance, compared with those conventionally offered in the Western Christian tradition; he finds resources in the natural world no longer present in his native country.

Hemingway in Italy is a relatively short, and very nicely produced, book that surveys one aspect of such transnational connections: Hemingway's involvement with Italy, the places he stayed in and visited, the people he met, and the fiction and (very occasionally) nonfiction inspired by his time there. In doing this, Richard Owen brings together a good deal of information to fill in a previously underrepresented aspect of Hemingway's biography and literary life. He covers most aspects of Hemingway's relationship with the country. These start with the wartime experiences but then go on to describe the later visits back there: to Genoa in 1922 (to cover the International Economic Conference for the Toronto Star); the sight-seeing trip with wife Hadley shortly thereafter; the 1923 Rapallo visit to see Ezra and Dorothy Pound; his 1927 driving tour with Guy Hickok; and the various trips between 1948 and 1954, with fourth (and last) wife Mary, to Venice and the surrounding Veneto and Friuli regions, and to the Riviera resort of Alassio. Owen also discusses both Hemingway's response to Mussolini and Italian politics more generally in the post-World War I period, and, in the more personal realm, his emotional involvements in Italy (at different points in his life) with the two women he did not marry but “for whom he felt overwhelming passion” (1), Agnes von Kurowsky and Adriana Ivancich. Where the book is best is in its use of local and previously largely untapped resources to carefully recapture both the geography of the places Hemingway visited and the ins and outs of the relationships that occurred there. The various forays into textual analysis are less convincing – the verdict on For Whom the Bell Tolls as “perhaps his finest novel” (117) and the defence he makes of the literary merits of Across the River and into the Trees are both questionable, to say the least. But this is perhaps to quibble, for the book is rooted in its biographical and geographical aspects – aspects which add another, and useful, dimension to the overall Hemingway story.