Flashes of Italy

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 27

Flashes of Italy

Journeys to the Underworld. By Fiona Pitt-Kethley. Chatto and Windus/ Book Reps, 1988. 226 pp. $49.95. (Reviewed by Naylor Hillary) “Food, drink, sex and money are the four great loves of my life,” remarks Miss Pitt-Kethley in her first chapter. She is a vigorous, forthright young woman who also has a fifth great love — of Roman antiquity, and especially of the prophetic Sybils of ancient legend and history. Here she writes an account of her travels in Italy in search of sites associated with the Sybils — and in search of her other loves as well. It must be one of the strangest travel books ever written — a modern female Casanova who tells almost all of her mixed fortunes in pursuit of classical scholarship and casual-sex. “Casual sex suits me very well as a lifestyle. I’m not exploited — I use as much as I’m being used. The morally inclined like to tell me that sooner or later I’ll catch some form of VD. Well, if I do, at least I’ll have the

consolation of knowing it wasn’t a friend who passed it on to me.” Perhaps this is the kind of book the recent New Zealand inquiry into

pornography had in mind when it recommended that women should be

encouraged to write erotica. But readers earn their purple passages. Miss Pitt-Kethley is also a poet; she writes splendidly; and most of what she writes has to do with Italian culture, past and present. There is more scholarship than porn in her

pages. Oddly enough, she found a lot of prudishness in modern Italy, although

she concedes it is not a bad place to go — for a man or an icecream. She samples both in curious places and positions — with mixed results. It all turns out better than it might in England where, according to Fiona, it is arguable whether an Englishman is worth waiting for. “It’s not very flattering if someone isn’t sure he wants to have sex with you and needs a few drinks to pluck up the courage.” Not that all goes smoothly. “Italian flashers are decidedly more active than British ones. I sometimes feel that I must be the face that launched a thousand flashers.” Fiona Pitt-Kethley has launched the most remarkable travel book for a long time. One wonders what a Sybil would prophesy next for her.