Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Eye of a Novelist on the Move

Hawthorne's notebooks are less a travelogue than a writer's sketchbook. He notes the market-carts in Newgate Street, the waiting-room fire, the irregular motion of the Channel steamer—details that ground the reader in the moment but also hint at a narrative sensibility. When he describes the Venus de' Medici, he does not simply praise her beauty; he observes the "slight degree of alarm" in her face, the way her "modest attitude" softens her from goddess to woman. This is the same psychological acuity he brings to his fictional characters. The broken and restored statue becomes a meditation on imperfection and survival: "each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments," yet she remains "very beautiful, very satisfactory."

Art, Appetite, and the Limits of Description

In the galleries, Hawthorne confesses a preference for Dutch and Flemish masters over Italian, finding them "like bread and beef and ale, after having been fed too long on made dishes." This gustatory metaphor reveals his hunger for the tangible, the everyday. He touches an unfinished bas-relief by Michelangelo, feeling a connection across time: "as if he might have been at work upon it only an hour ago." Yet he also acknowledges the inadequacy of words before great art. Of the Venus, he writes, "It is of no use to throw heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away." The tension between the desire to capture and the recognition of failure runs through these pages.

Weather, Weariness, and the Texture of Travel

Throughout the excerpts, weather is not mere backdrop but an active force. The "bitterly cold" morning, the snow that falls in "scattered and almost invisible flakes," the wintry air that discourages exploration—these details create a mood of subdued discomfort. Hawthorne's phrasing often carries a note of resignation: "we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to find nothing genial and hospitable there any more." Travel, for him, is as much about endurance as discovery. The physical facts—packing trunks, waiting in stations, crossing choppy seas—anchor the narrative in the body's experience, reminding us that even a writer of romance must contend with cold feet and delayed trains.

These notebooks offer a rare view of Hawthorne not as the master of allegory but as a traveler trying to make sense of new sights through the lens of his own temperament. Readers will find not a polished travel book but a record of impressions in progress—sometimes weary, sometimes delighted, always observant. The value lies in watching a novelist think on the page, testing his responses against the marble and the landscape, and leaving us to follow his gaze.

That rainy afternoon, Hawthorne’s weary stroll through Roman galleries lingered with me, his quiet longing for some green American shade. I closed the book, and my gaze fell on a shelf where Palmetto-Leaves — Themes and Context waited. It felt like stepping from a dim, crowded room into a porch where the air was soft and the palms breathed slowly. A different solitude, nearly a homecoming.