Nietzsche in Turin

by Lesley Chamberlain

During 1888 in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche wrote three of his most important works - Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and The Antichrist. As she recounts the dramatic births of those books, Chamberlain paints a portrait of the majestic baroque city in which Nietzsche spent the last sane year of his life before his famous mental breakdown damaged him permanently. Nietzsche in Turin is both a remarkable book of travel literature and a unique biography of one of our most celebrated, though often misunderstood, thinkers. In Chamberlain's account, Friedrich Nietzsche emerges as a gentle, tortured man, dominated by his rigorous mind and his love of music, and soothed by the strangely otherworldly city of Turin.