The World as a Labyrinth

Magna Graecia

Travels in Greek Southern Italy

In Magna Graecia, Gustav René Hocke tells of the Southern Italy of the Greeks and Saracens, Normans and Hohenstaufens. Impregnated in landscapes of elemental natural beauty, and in places filled with symbols of the European history of ideas, are thousands of stories that have made the world we know today. The author, who spent the greater part of his life in Italy, does not describe this vanished cultural landscape with cool detachment; rather, he has written a travel diary in which past and present, sensuality and abstraction, experience and contemplation are combined in an exciting interrelationship. It explores not only a geographical area of unique beauty but an important part of European history no longer accessible in that form to the modern reader.