Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa

John Elder, Professor of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, is the author of Reading the Mountains of Home and The Frog Run.

Set aside your Bella Tuscanys and Year in Provences for a different kind of travel book. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa puts a walking stick in your hand and Marsh's Man and Nature in your knapsack, exploring how Italians have managed their natural and cultural heritage in ways that sustain both. John Elder's poetic meditations on land and life demonstrate that only by searching beyond our familiar boundaries can we discover better ways of living back at home. - Marcus Hall, author of Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration ""This collaboration - between George Perkins Marsh and John Elder, between Vermont and Italy, between maple and olive - is one of the smartest, soundest, deepest books about the relationship between people and nature that I've ever read. It will be a classic."" - Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature ""Elder's impassioned pilgrimage shows us how to delight in messy wilderness, to secure a curative habitation of the world, and, with Marsh, to lend ecological nous to our gravest task: knowing ourselves and respecting one another. Let the maple seeds and olive stones of Elder's visionary harvest restore to us a reflective and redemptory future."" - from the foreword by David Lowenthal