Architecture and culture in italy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Architecture and culture in italy - Essay ExampleFor this reason, thus far authors such as Ernest Heming counselling, notorious for his brevity and deceptively simple-sounding stories, can reveal much about the areas they write about. In the novel Across the River and Into the Trees, written in 1950, Hemingway provides a great deal of detail about Italy both in what he says and in what he doesnt say. The story begins with a morning of duck hunting. The wizard emerges slowly, simply called the shooter at first. His personality is the first thing that becomes known about him as it is revealed through his words with the boatman, his thoughts and his actions. Although coarse and irritable, he is also relieve in his treatment of others and his appreciation of beauty. This is seen in his irritation with the boatman as they work through the ice of the canal, Get your back in it, jerk (3) as compared to his understanding of the same man at the end of the go for once the Colonel realizes it was his military jacket that set the man off. Throughout the novel, most of which is a flashback to the long time just prior to the duck hunt, the people of Italy are consistently referred to as polite and more honest than people elsewhere Its a tougher town than capital of Wyoming when you really know it, and everybody is very polite (35). Yet there are continual hints that things are not quite as idyllic as the Colonel wants to depiction it. Such an instance is introduced in scenes such as the one where the Colonel, then a general, knocked two men unconscious for having the impertinence to whistle at Renata at an even earlier time period or the scene in which he finds it necessary to scare two punks away from him by pretending to be carrying pistols in his pockets as he walks around Venice with Renatas family emeralds in his pocket. The Colonels ability to appreciate the beauty of the landscape around him also helps to reveal the character and geography of Italy. This initial landscape is seen as particularly inhospitable, though, full of icy canals and tall grasses - giving an impression of a frozen marshland. It is expanded as the Colonel and his driver make their way across country as one farm blended, almost blurred, into another farm and you could only see what was far ahead and moving toward you (14) and given metric grain as the driver starts to talk about the artists of the country, such as Titian if he painted any pictures of that country up around there, with those sunset color rocks and the pines and the bump and all the pointed steeples (15-16). This glimpse of the country is also given a dual nature as the Colonel approaches the city, looking out at the flat canal-lined boulevard that theyre interest and remembering the ghastly scene of soldiers bodies, bloated and floating on unmoving water in those canals and yet also observing the peaceful, gentle motion of a span from one of the barges moving slowly through one of those canals. This image of Italy finally opens up into the streets of Venice with the mention of St. Mark Square and the Colonel relives his last day with his girl, a 20-year-old inhering beauty in a segment that takes up most of the bulk of the book. In this consistent representation of the dual nature of both the people and the place, the book is very much in keeping with the historical era in which it was written. The second World War had just ended in which many of the of age(p) men fighting had already seen their share