Reflections on Blue Water

Part memoir, part travel journal, this work records the long acquaintance of Alan Ross with the islands in the Gulf of Naples. As well as being a description of the islands themselves, it recalls some of those who brought fame by their presence - Lenin, Rilke, Malaparte, and D.H. Lawrence.

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The fifth book, part memoir, part travel journal, by Alan Ross. It is based on his long acquaintance with the islands in the Gulf of Naples. Demobilised from the Navy, the war still fresh, Ross made a series of journeys in 1948 on foot all over Ischia, producing a kind of anatomy. He spent summers there in the 1950s and 1960s, a period when Moravia, Koestler, Auden and William Walton among others, made Maria's Bar in Forio a centre of gossip. More recently he returned: Capri in winter, Ischia at the end of the summer, the Aeolian islands in spring. This book, as well as being a description of the islands themselves, recalls some of those who brought fame by their presence - Gorky, Lenin, and Bunin; Pablo Neruda and Walter Benjamin; Rilke, Malaparte and Alex Munthe; D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, and Compton Mackenzie. Naples, too, is an important part of Ross's experience and he records his pleasure in recalling it through the writings of Lewis and Burns.