Henry Miller named Jean Giono as one of the writers he most admired (a list that includes Knut Hamsun, Blaise Cendrars, and Fyodor Dostoevsky). Giono, who lived most of his life in Manosque, the small Provençal town where he was born, begins An Italian Journey (Marlboro Press) by admitting that he is not a traveller: “I seem scarcely to have moved in fifty years.” Although Manosque is just a short drive from the Italian frontier, Giono had never visited Italy before this 1951 journey, which he made in the company of his wife and another couple. The foursome gradually make their way across northern Italy to Venice, then south through the Apennines to Florence before turning back toward home. En route, Giono detours to explore the region his father came from, and to visit the sites of battles that have captured his imagination since boyhood. In Giono you have a guide who prefers out-of-the-way corners and back roads, one who rejects “the vulgarity of the entire Côte d’Azur” with its “kilometers of women in the buff” for things like “deserts, prisons, and monasteries.” If you’d like the company of a fascinating and observant companion on a leisurely drive through Italy, then Giono’s An Italian Journey could be just the thing.