'The Apennines are Italy' exclaimed The Examiner two centuries ago, yet this unique region and its striking literary and cultural connections are underappreciated in the English-speaking world. Apennine Crossings: Travellers on the Edge of Tuscany links a twenty-first century journey in the mountains of Northern Italy to past writers, routes, and travellers. It follows the modern long-distance walking trail of the 'Great Apennine Excursion', whilst moving back and forth in time: from the Middle Ages to World War Two and from the journeys of pilgrims, merchants, and tourists to those of soldiers, partisans, and poets. Stories of past travellers in the region continually intersect with a contemporary account of a walk across the ridge of the Northern Apennines. Alongside Nick Havely's present-day narrator and traveller, the cast of characters includes major writers and poets, such as Dante, Montaigne, Goethe, Shelley, and Stendhal, together with a multitude of less well-known figures whose journeys, experiences, and responses cast new light on a landscape that is close to yet remote from the sites typically visited by modern travellers to Italy. Havely draws these earlier travellers' stories from a wide range of published and unpublished sources such as letters, journals, memoirs, poems, and interviews. Together, they illustrate several significant themes: the histories of mountain passes, remote lakes, and ancient sanctuaries; perceptions of the mountains; the social and religious culture of the Northern Apennines; the preoccupations of literary tourism; the impact of campaigns and conflict during World War Two; and the effects of depopulation and deforestation. The Apennine region features in its full literary, historical, and cultural richness. Included are twenty-six illustrations, with maps for the whole route and for the sections covered by each of the book's seven chapters.

This book is a model of how to produce cultural history because it deals with convergences instead of mere trains of events, similarities along with differences, lines of intersection rather than those of demarcation; but it is also an example of how a critic with an academic background can become a writer without renouncing that background or being confined by it ... * Il Sole 24 0re *
Apennine Crossings is a remarkable tribute to Italy's enduring hold on the world's imagination and desire. Brilliantly fusing his own experience of climbing and hiking along the great central spine of the Italian peninsula with those of pilgrims, refugees, wartime fugitives and a host of literary free spirits among the ridges, screes and passes, Nick Havely notes 'strangeness and suddenness' as essential Apennine characteristics. They surely irradiate this arresting and deeply-felt book'. * Jonathan Keates *
Nick Havely has all the credentials to relive the experience of La Grande Escursione Apenninica: at the end of a distinguished career in medieval Italian and English literature, he calls himself a 'recovering academic'. This magical book is an absorbing account of his demanding personal journey in the footsteps of formidable predecessors: travellers, soldiers, writers and artists, starting with Piero's 'Resurrection' at Sansepolcro ('the greatest painting in the world' according to Aldous Huxley) and reaching Lunigiana with Dante who is a shadow presence and absence throughout. It is a personal gazetteer of immense scope and charm, a fully defined and haunting landscape and mindscape of European culture with wonders and discoveries on every page of its journey across Italy and from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. * Bernard O'Donoghue *
What Havely's account shares with these beautiful books is an underlying experiential, in-depth connection with mountains, which it combines with a wide-ranging, erudite but always enlivening interest in their cultural perception through the centuries. * Maurizio Ascari, Linguae & - Journal of Modern Languages and Cultures *
I must admit that this has been a wonderful discovery for the reader. Such a lot of stories that I didn't know about! [...] If you're interested in linking the trail to the narratives and events relating to the Apennines of Tuscany, Emilia and Romagna and can read English, then this is a book that I would recommend. * Simone Bellei, Cammino Newsletter *
The meticulously researched book draws on a wide range of published and unpublished material including letters, journal articles, early books and other sources. * Strider Magazine *

Nick Havely is Emeritus Professor at the University of York, where he taught courses on English and Italian literature for forty years. In 1977-8 he was Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University, and from 1989 he collaborated with the University of Bologna on one of the earliest ERASMUS exchanges and research networks. He was awarded research fellowships by the Leverhulme Trust (2005) and the Fondazione Bogliasco (2014). In 2012 he was elected a member of the Oxford Dante Society; he recently became an Honorary Member of the Dante Society of America.