Essays

Elizabeth McPhee writes biweekly essays on Italy, art, memory, place, and the hidden life of ordinary things.

The essays often begin with something small: a shuttered window, a garden wall, a village street, a bronze handprint, a chapel, a painting, a fragment of history, the trace of a person no longer present. From there, they follow the associations that gather around objects, places, and images, especially in Italy, where beauty and concealment so often live close together.

These pieces belong to the same imaginative world as the fiction: old houses, inherited silence, family history, works of art, vanished lives, and the ways the past continues to press against the present. Here are a few of the essays:

Before the Sculpture, before the Architecture, There was a Hand
At the Tempio di Canova in Possagno, a small bronze handprint interrupts neoclassical perfection with the simplest human trace.

The Cimiteri dei Burci
The half-sunken burci of Casier reveal a vanished river world of barges, barcari, inherited knowledge, and the quiet violence of progress.

Ciao! Ciao! A Domani
A walk along the River Sile becomes a meditation on age, ritual, seasonal beauty, and the private life of an elderly woman

returning through the gate of her residenza.

Read the essays on Substack

ElizabethMcPhee.Substack.com