Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair. Battered by World War II, Naples would remain for decades one of the most violent and impoverished places in Italy, but in its passion, vivacity, and beauty, the city still justified the loving words written about it by Goethe, Byron, and others over the centuries. Here are the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them: "The ghosts of this region are too many, and too vital, to sadden us," Hazzard writes. "Rather, they create a company, ironic and benign, to which we ourselves may ultimately hope to belong."--Publisher description.

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