I viaggi di Freud in Italia [Freud's Travels to Italy]. By Marina D'Angelo. Turin, Italy:  Bollati Boringhieri, 2024,  303 pp., $23.60 paperback.

Unpublished material by Freud—handwritten in German and recently uncovered in the U.S. Library of Congress—has not yet been published in the very country that houses the library. In I Viaggi di Freud in Italia (Freud's Travels to Italy), Marina D'Angelo explores Sigmund Freud's connection with Italy through a historical and psychoanalytic lens. The book stems from a remarkable discovery in 2009 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where researchers Gerhard Fichtner and Albrecht Hirschmüller found a previously unexamined container holding 10 of Freud's pocket notebooks. The notebooks, carried by Freud during his travels and thought to be lost, escaped his efforts to destroy personal documents. The notebooks offer a glimpse into his thoughts and experiences during his 25 trips to Italy, an aspect of Freud's life largely unknown to the American readership. Published by Bollati Boringhieri, this is D'Angelo's first book in Italian, building on her extensive research into Freud's life and the history of psychoanalysis.

D'Angelo, a scholar in Italian studies and a historian of psychoanalysis working in Germany, not only presents the details of these travel notebooks but meticulously integrates Freud's extensive correspondence and published works with the notebooks to reconstruct a snapshot of where Freud stood, day by day, as he journaled his travels across the Italian peninsula. It is akin to watching a cinematic vignette of young Freud in an Italian hotel room, immersed in his thoughts as he contemplates his theory of dreams—still unformulated—during the intellectual labor that will give birth to The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953a, 1900/1953b).

One can also envision him awakening from one of his m