A Sweet and Glorious Land: Revisiting the Ionian Sea

In the winter of 1897-1898, Victorian writer George Gissing made a well-chronicled journey throughout southern Italy. The result was a book, By the Ionian Sea, in which he detailed the influence of ancient Greece on the peninsula and contrasted the glory of Greece and its magnificent cities to the southern Italy of the late 1800s. The book was published in 1901 and has since become a classic in travel literature.