Evocations of Italy

A collector’s edition of a world-historical classic

In 1907, Pavel Muratov, a budding littérateur and art connoisseur from Moscow, set off for Italy with his wife, three friends, and a dozen books on the Italian Renaissance. This journey, the first of over a dozen he would make in a decade, inspired an obsession with the country’s art and culture that would produce, in the words of Clive James, “one of the most dazzling books of its type ever written.” First published in Russian between 19...