La mia prima estate sulla Sierra

The summer discussed in this book is the summer of 1869. John Muir is thirty-one years old. Scottish by origin, he immigrated to America at the age of eleven, eclectic and brilliant, he has already done everything, even being an inventor. But since a factory accident temporarily blinded him, he knows for sure what he wants to do for the rest of his days: the vagabond. Tramp, a word dear to the American tradition, evokes large spaces and men who travel them on foot: a tradition, literary and otherwise, which from the first pioneers reaches up to the beat poets of the twentieth century [...]
My first summer in the Sierra it is a travel diary: published more than forty years after it was written, but little edited, it retains the freshness of the notes jotted down from evening to evening next to the camp fire. The world that opens up before Muir's eyes is not new only to him. White people “discovered” Yosemite Valley recently. Exploitation, including tourism, began immediately: in California in those years everything happened at a rapid pace. Muir is not a tourist; he looks with the eyes full of wonder of a nineteenth-century naturalist: the scientist is still an explorer, science does not manipulate, it describes. Minute details and large panoramas, shapes and colors: an urgency to say that echoes man's amazement in the face of creation [...]