ITALIAN WAYS

An entertaining and revealing portrait of Italy in flux—observed by riding its trains.

Travel writer Tim Parks’s best-selling books on Italy have been hailed as “so vivid, so packed with delectable details, [they] serve as a more than decent substitute for the real thing” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, in his first Italian travelogue in a decade, he brings us a fresh portrait of Italy today through a wry account of its train system. Whether describing his daily commute from Milan to Verona, his regular trips to Florence and Rome, or his occasional sojourns to Naples and Sicily, Parks uses his thirty years of amusing and maddening experiences on Italian trains to reveal what he calls the “charmingly irritating dystopian paradise” of Italy. For anyone who has ever been enchanted by Italy or dreamed of visiting, Italian Ways is a perfect companion. Tim Parks is the author of the best-selling Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. His novels have won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Betty Trask Prize and have been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books.