Journey to the South

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Customer reviews

review by: Leanne date: 2008-09-07 rating:
A brilliant book
The 3rd of Annie Hawes books, this one sees her and her Calabrese fidanzato heading south to his ancestrial home of Calabria. A great book and I love that you feel that you know the whole family. Being half Calabrese, and having a Calabrese fidanzato myself I really could appreciate all she was writing about.
All 3 of her books are my all time favourites.

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review by: date: 2007-10-17 rating:
Realistic and Relevant!
I really enjoyed this latest offering from Annie Hawes. Her wonderful descriptions of the people she met in Calabria are so realistic. Maybe it is because I now live in Italy but much of her writing seemed relevant to life here in Lazio. I have to say though I do wonder how some of the personalities featured would react if they were ever to read about themselves!!

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review by: date: 2007-05-24 rating:
Half a goat's head
In the mid-1980s, the British sisters, Annie and Lucy Hawes, fled cold and rainy Shepherd's Bush to graft roses in the Italian Riviera region of Liguria, and ended up buying a dilapidated farmhouse with adjacent olive grove near the town of Diano San Pietro. This story of culture shock comprised Annie's first book, EXTRA VIRGIN. Lucy subsequently left Annie to manage the farm on her own, and the latter's continuing coping exploits were shared in her second volume, RIPE FOR THE PICKING, in which she meets a man with romantic potential, Ciccio de Gilio. Now, in the third installment, JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH, Annie and Ciccio are each other's significant other. The book's title is inspired by a death in the de Gilio family, an event which compels Ciccio, his mother Francesca, his sister Marisa, and Marisa's son Alberto, to travel to the de Gilio ancestral home in Calabria, the toe of Italy's boot, to attend the funeral of Francesca's brother. Annie, of course, comes along to meet the extended family back in the "old country", and her introduction to yet another culture, Italian in name only, is the fodder for the story.

As an author, Annie Hawes is engaging largely due to her irrepressible and dry wit, as demonstrated in this excerpt from EXTRA VIRGIN:

"This horrible thing appeared to me as I was sitting under the lemon tree ... gazing focused and abstracted at the foliage below me moving gently in the sea breeze... One tall stalk that seemed oddly out of rhythm with the rest gradually drew my attention... Some sinister kind of long skinny snake was sitting among the tall grass, waving its top half around, cunningly camouflaged as a bit of plant life and hoping, I suppose, to catch some unwary plump insect... not just a concealed snake, but an actively duplicitous snake. We didn't need any of that sort of behavior so close to home... We set off a-sickling with renewed vim and mild hysteria, stamping about heavily to scare off serpent life as we went."

Unfortunately, in JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH, the narrative gets bogged down with the personalities, contemporary activities, and around-the-dinner-table discourse between Ciccio, Francesca, Marisa, a flock of Calabrian relatives, and various hangers-on, all of whom may be interesting characters, but not THAT interesting. The book suffers for it; too many times I caught myself counting the pages I had to go to reach the end. Events that should've been emphasized and the source of much humor, such as the refurbishment of an old farmhouse and orange grove inherited by Francesca, and the literal re-discovery of an overgrown hilltop lot, replete with ancient ruins, inherited by Ciccio, were reduced to a few cursory paragraphs. Much text is devoted to Calabrian cuisine, in which hot, red peppers seem to predominate. Oh, did I mention a local delicacy, a goat's head sliced in half vertically?

Surprisingly, Annie apparently had an eventful life before landing in Diano San Pietro. At 16, she ran away to marry an Irish/Jamaican boyfriend, a relationship that foundered almost immediately. She has a son, now in his late twenties, by a second man. "Lucy" is not her sister's real name. You get none of this from her trilogy. What does come across is that Hawes is a sweetheart. According to the Web, Annie is currently 54 and living happily with Ciccio in Liguria. They purchased a 25-room house further up the valley, and the experience of fixing the place up will perhaps afford material for another book. Despite the failings of JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH, I'll buy it.

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review by: date: 2006-10-23 rating:
A Southern delight
Despite a healthy love of all things Italian, I try to avoid books entitled "A Year in..." so I hadn't read any of Annie Hawes' material. Two pages in to this, however, and I was hooked. Enough and probably everything has been written about life in Tuscany, villas on the hills, blah, blah, blah; this book takes you to the underbelly of daily existence, southern Italian style. Calabria is a region deprived of its northern cousins' fame, yet exudes a life from days of yore, and Annie Hawes captures the intricacies of morning coffee, preparing mountains of lavishly described food and how/when/why to eat, with social and well-paced historical comment. Ms Hawes has a delicate eye for the detail and takes you on a journey not just to the toe of Italy, but to the heart of the mezzogiorno. Bravissimo!


review by: treesilhouette date: 2005-10-17 rating:
An eye opener
Annie Hawes has a vivid way of writing about both people and places. Here she covers her first visit, and the de Gillio family's return to their southern roots. However, for some of the de Gillios much of Calabrian custom is as strange as Annie finds it. So there is a double strand of reactions to local customs, plus discovery by Annie of which "Ligurian customs" that she has known for years are in fact transported Calabrian ones.
She also covers the region's history, and I was stunned by how economically repressed the area had been - even into the 20th century.

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