Wonderful report of a man’s love affair with Greece, “Greece has twisted itself in my skeleton like a climbing flower”(p. 203).

In an evocative way Levi (priest, poet, scholar) describes his journeys through and stays in the country from 1963 till 1978 - and in some ways for those who visited Greece this book is a real vacation. You see the light again, feel the heat, are refreshed by the sea, smell the scents, hear the sounds.

Levi also reports of his labour on Pausanias, he is the translator of Pausanias Guide to Greece for which he visited all the sites himself.
And he tells of his friendships with Seferis, Gatsos, Katsimbalis and others poets. How they all lived and some died during the terrible years of the regime of the Colonels.

In Athens “the cemetery became one of my favorite lurking places. The heroes of the war of independence lie here, in a wilderness of other monuments, and the first Greek aviator, and by now a number of my friends. The neoclassic marbles run riot, they reflower as rococo, they burst out into sunblasts of baroque. My favorite tomb is that of Makryiannis, the peasant general of 1821 whose memoirs, written with a purity and a force that has no parallel in Europe since the sixteenth century, are the foundation documents of whatever is best in Greece. They were recovered as wrapping paper from a butcher’s shop, and it was George Seferis who first pointed to their profundity and their value. During the 1939 war they circulated in typescript; the Germans put a price on the head of rebellious Makryiannis. Under the Colonels, people left red carnations at his monument. His face on the bronze plaque is consumed with rage and suffering; he has the face of a starved prophet. In his old age he wrote a long and bitter series of reproach to God. He was imprisoned, tortured, virtually starved to death, under the early monarchy. I am constantly moved to tears by his writings” (p. 138) ( )