D. H. Lawrence's Travels and the Italian Dream. Homage to a friend

A discussion of the meaning of the journey in Lawrence’s life and works through a close reference to the critical writings on D. H. Lawrence by the late Peter Preston, a homage to a friend and a brilliant Lawrentian scholar. Sea and Sardinia and Twilight in Italy focus on the awareness on Lawrence’s part of the cultural difference between him and the Italians, whereas in Mr Noon Lawrence celebrates the importance and significance of multiplicity showing somehow his will to privilege a European perspective and to reject the limited British view and way of feeling. Lawrence’s last travel book, Sketches of Etruscan Places, allows a post-colonial reading of the Etruscans as a people silenced by the Romans and, therefore, to be considered in the perspective of the “Subaltern Studies”. Finally, a comparison between D. H. Lawrence and Bruce Chatwin points out how travelling becomes for them a philosophy of life, a method of inner exploration which intensified their sense of cultural identity, assuming, at the same time, the double meaning of a flight from England and from a Eurocentric vision of the world, and a spiritual and existential search for a deeper meaning of life.