Studies of Travel: Italy — Key Ideas to Explore

The Walls as Argument

In the chapter on Anagni, Freeman’s prose becomes most animated when he confronts a scholarly disagreement. He walks the circuit of the ancient walls, convinced they are Hernican—pre-Roman—only to find that the geographer E. H. Bunbury has dismissed them as “of Roman date and of little interest.” Freeman does not simply accept this verdict. He questions what “Roman date” might mean, and whether a wall that still bounds an inhabited town can ever be of little interest. The passage is a miniature essay on how evidence is interpreted: Freeman notes the rectangular stones, the use of the arch, the alternation of light stone and dark peperino, and the buttresses that must be distinguished from later additions. He does not claim to have settled the question, but he makes the reader see the wall as a problem worth arguing about.

Pace and the Traveller’s Gaze

Freeman’s narrative pace varies markedly between chapters. In Arezzo, the tempo is leisurely: he remarks on the difficulty of buying a newspaper, the cleanliness of the streets, the bridge that “has to be sought for.” The prose lingers on the physical site, the relation of river to hill, the absence of a panoramic view. In the Anagni section, the pace quickens as Freeman walks the wall and then retreats to his library to consult Bunbury. The shift from outdoor observation to indoor research is itself a structural device: the traveller’s experience is incomplete without the historian’s check. Freeman often uses such changes of pace to signal a move from description to argument, or from the immediate impression to the longer view.

Voice and the Use of Quotation

Freeman’s voice is distinctive for its willingness to address the reader directly and to admit uncertainty. In the Anagni chapter, he writes, “Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls?” and later, “We come back to our library; we take down the Dictionary of Geography.” This first-person plural—the “we” of the traveller-scholar—creates a sense of shared inquiry. Freeman also weaves in quotations from classical authors and later writers, but he does so sparingly. The epigraph from Vergil’s Georgics (“tot congesta manu praeruptis oppida saxis”) sets a theme of hilltop towns built by human labour. Inside the chapters, quotations are usually short and pointed, as when he cites Macaulay’s lines about walls “reared by the hands of giants” only to contrast them with the workmanlike masonry of Anagni.

Freeman’s Studies of Travel: Italy rewards a reader who is willing to move at the author’s own pace—to pause over a wall, to follow a footnote, to entertain a doubt. The essays are not guides in the modern sense; they are conversations between a traveller and his books. To read them well is to accept that the journey matters as much as the destination, and that the most interesting discoveries often come from what the author does not know.

There’s a particular solitude in tracing old stones, like Freeman’s walls at Anagni — you feel the centuries press in. Reading him, I drift to other vast silences. Somehow, the empty prairies of The Great Lone Land A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America — Edition Insights came to mind, another kind of history written not in brick, but in absence.