Write around Italy: Richard E. Grant's favourite Italian reads

In Write Around the World, Richard E. Grant combines his passion for travel with a love of all things literary. His journey through Italy reveals much about the lives and experiences of the authors who preceded him there.

The trip gives him fresh insights into the people and diversity of the region and its distinctive and captivating landscapes. Richard also learns how some of the books he encounters have had a direct impact on the area that inspired them.

Richard begins his journey among the crumbling palazzi and crowded alleyways of Naples. Despite its obvious charms, Naples has a reputation for poverty, crime and corruption. However, in recent years the city has also enjoyed a boom in tourism – due in part to the enormous success of Elena Ferrante’s bestseller My Brilliant Friend.

Local guide and journalist Sophia Seymour accompanies Richard to some of the places brought to life by Ferrante. They visit the bustling market where the characters in My Brilliant Friend might have worked and, further off the beaten track, venture into the fascist-era housing blocks in the Rione Luzzati, the suburb where the two girls at the heart of the novel grow up in the 1950s under the shadow of the local Mafia.

Charles Dickens' travelogue Pictures from Italy described Naples as a city teeming with life, where superstition and a belief in miracles were the main survival tools for a people blighted by poverty and corruption.

Richard finds that some of the spectacles and traditions described by Dickens are still thriving. One such example is the famous religious ritual in which a vial of the blood of the city’s patron saint and protector, the Catholic martyr San Gennaro, miraculously turns to liquid three times a year.

Richard also tries his luck on the lottery, which Dickens was fascinated to encounter for the first time in Naples.

You can read Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens for free online.

Naples is considered the birthplace of pizza largely thanks to the famous San Marzano tomatoes that grew on the fertile soil at the base of Vesuvius.

In her memoir Eat, Pray, Love the American author Elizabeth Gilbert described her epic journey following a bitter divorce. Her travels took her to Naples to find the perfect pizza. Richard visits the restaurant where Gilbert's dreams finally came true.

Naples '44 is Norman Lewis’s classic account of his year spent as an intelligence officer for the allied forces. It offers a vivid reminder of the city’s continued struggle with poverty and misfortune under the shadow of the great volcano Vesuvius, which erupted during Lewis’s time here.

Climbing Vesuvius, Richard remembers both Lewis’s extraordinary account and the description by Charles Dickens of his expedition to the summit of the volcano. Looking into the crater, he stands on the spot where Dickens stood in 1845 bathed in red light, having walked up by night at a time when the volcano was going through a regular cycle of eruptions.

South of Vesuvius, Richard travels to the city of Pompeii that was famously destroyed by the volcano in 79AD.

Here, informed by Robert Harris’s thriller Pompeii, Richard explores the remains of what was once was a thriving Roman town. He visits key locations in the novel, including the spot where the city’s water flowed from the region’s famous aqueduct.

In the glamorous town of Positano, just 8 miles south of Pompeii on the Amalfi coastline, Richard spends a night at the hotel where American crime writer Patricia Highsmith stayed in 1952 after a tempestuous journey through Europe with her girlfriend Ellen Blumenthal Hill.

Looking out onto the beach from the balcony of her hotel room one morning, Highsmith was inspired to create her most famous character Tom Ripley as she watched ‘a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach’. Richard explores the aspirational appeal of Positano and how this shaped The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Travelling south to the Basilicata region, Richard’s final stop on his Italian tour is the city of Matera, now a UNESCO world heritage site but just 80 years ago considered ‘the shame of Italy’. Here he looks at how the city’s fortunes were changed by Carlo Levi’s book Christ Stopped at Eboli, an account of his time spent in the region when he was exiled by Mussolini’s government for anti-fascist activities during the 1930s.

Levi discovered unimaginable poverty and a city where 20,000 people were living in caves dug into the rock, known as the Sassi. The publication of his book in 1945 resulted in the government moving the inhabitants of the Sassi into modern housing. Richard meets Antonio Nicoletti, whose father grew up in the Sassi, and stays in a cave hotel.