DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE

D. H. Lawrence

Lawrence's house

David Herbert Lawrence (1885- 1930) visited Italy in the years 1919 - 1922, when he was in a voluntary exile. Lawrence wanted to escape from England and to come back to Italy, where he had been twice, before the war. He thought that Italy could favour the physical and moral recovery he yearned for, after the sufferings and the disintegration caused by the war. He stayed in Florence, in Capri, in Sicily, and during one of these journeys he lived for some weeks, with his wife Frieda, in December 1919, in a farmhouse in the countryside of Picinisco, a small village in the province of Frosinone. The emotions felt in those surroundings were recorded in his novel "The lost girl", written in 1920; the story, in the final chapters, is set in the villages of Ossona and Pescocalascio (false nouns that the author used for the little towns of Picinisco and Atina). Some years ago it was found the farmhouse where Lawrence lived in Picinisco and now it’s possible to visit it and to live the emotions felt by Lawrence and by the principal character of his novel, Alvina.