A Room With A View and Call Me By Your Name: Italy

 A Room With A View and Call Me By Your Name: Italian romances


There’s something inexplicably romantic about Italy. Italy in some ways feels like it’s unattainable. There’s a dreamlike quality to it: the heat of the Italian summer, the brevity of a summer holiday over the space of a few weeks. There’s a sense of freedom which resists time and social conventions. In the true spirit of holiday escapism, what follows on today’s blog is my romanticisation of Italy. (And I suppose it doesn't hurt that the 1985 adaptation of A Room with a View and the 2017 adaptation of Call Me By Your Name are both beautifully shot films).



Italy is, incidentally, the key setting of the two stories I’m interested in today: André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name and E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. There are plenty of differences between the two stories. Primarily, the former depicts love between two men in the 1980s, and the latter explores Edwardian expectations about the social suitability and acceptability of a match. In Forster’s novel Florence is a place which unites people and produces progress and self-discovery. Florence represents liberation. In Aciman’s novel, Italy is a place of rapture and rupture: there is a convergence of two people, followed by heartbreaking separation and a deep sense of abandonment. When all is said and done, the fact remains that Italy is at the centre of these romances.



But how much emphasis should we put on the presence of Italy in these two stories? Is Italy a truly fundamental part of the stories, or does it happen to be present for its romantic associations? Further than that: does it have those associations because it has been used in stories like these?


There seems to be a chicken and egg problem going on here regarding Italy and romance: does this mean we often look to other sources for a means to rationalise or compartmentalise certain emotions and memories? Does attaching romance to Italy become a way of understanding and actualising romance - giving it some kind of shape? Is it also true that by attaching meaning and symbolism, Italy loses its meaning and becomes some enigmatic, distorted idea of romance? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. 



In A Room with a View, Italy exists in the characters’ memories, and is therefore warped by the emotions connected to it. A holiday to Florence changes Lucy Honeychurch’s life forever, but it’s a place she can leave in memory (or at least she tries to). Lucy has the ability to come and go, the freedom to remember Italy as she wants to. 



Call Me By Your Name almost does the opposite by not allowing us to leave Italy. Elio is trapped in his memories which conflate the romance of Italy with his home and family, whilst Oliver’s romance can be as brief and impermanent as his stay at the Perlman home that fateful summer.



Italy is an escape from the emotions and memories which threaten to overwhelm its characters. It’s just a matter of how far away from Italy those characters are able to go. 

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