Amours de Voyage Arthur Hugh Clough Lightning Source, 52pp, £11.95 ISBN 141910599X

More than 50 years ago in these pages, V S Pritchett called Arthur Hugh Clough the "poet of tourism". A nice phrase: more poetry should deal in boredom and inconvenience, and the suspicion that lots of ordinary and important things are happening to everyone else. Amid, of course, occasional flares of curiosity. In 1849, Clough travelled through Italy and observed, among other things, the brief Roman republic declared by Mazzini and Garibaldi. Clough lingered in Rome into the summer, even when the French General Oudinot led his army against the city. His letters to England, already shaped into verse, described the siege to his friends. He didn't become too closely involved himself: he sympathised, pontificated, wrote, and once, maybe, saw a man die. These letters eventually found their way into his epistolary novel, Amours de Voyage.

The work is a kind of political A Room with a View, told from the perspective of a 19th-century Cecil Vyse rather than Lucy. Claude is an educated, snobbish young Englishman who inevitably falls in with his wandering fellow countrymen. "We turn like fools to the English," he complains. "And I am asked, in short, and am not good at excuses." He meets the "Misses Trevellyn", a family of three girls, one of whom is already engaged to Vernon, a mutual acquaintance. The father is sensible; the mother intellectually curious, though "in her loftiest flights still/Grates the fastidious ear with the slightly mercantile accent". He strikes up a flirtation with another of the daughters, Mary, and wonders why he bothers.

It is a wonder that runs through much of the poem. Rome disappoints: "Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it." As for St Peter's: "Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!" He paints the Trevellyns with equal contempt: "Middle-class people these, bankers very likely, not wholly/Pure of the taint of the shop." This is, however, a young man's contempt which, as the siege goes on and his acquaintance deepens, turns into a young man's enthusiasm. Even he feels the fire of revolution and dreams "of a sword at my side and a battle-horse underneath me". He admits that there's something "pleasant" about the "feminine presence". And though he theatrically asks his friend, "Is it contemptible, Eustace, - I'm perfectly ready to think so, -/ Is it, - the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people?", he eventually decides that it isn't. The problem is his: "'Tis not her fault, 'tis her beautiful nature, not ever to know me." If she could know him - a consummation requiring a little adaptation on both sides - he might be happier for it.

Most of the plot depends on Mary's letters: unpretentious, honest, with just enough spice of vanity to make her attractive. The misses leave Rome when the siege grows violent. "Why doesn't Mr Claude come with us?" she asks. "We don't know,/You should know better than we. He talked of the Vatican marbles;/But I can't wholly believe that this was the actual reason."

Eventually, he does abandon his political doubts to resolve his personal ones, and spends the rest of the book chasing her through Italy: a love defied not by family or class, but by the inconveniences of tourism. He can't work out which hotels she's staying at. It's a wonderful story; you can finish it in the time it takes to drink two cups of tea. The hexameters in which it is written read like prose falling down stairs. All good old books seem timely, but Amours de Voyage strikes an almost contemporary note.

Its hero is more confident of his taste than anything else, and wants to know, as do all tourists, how far a cultivated taste can take him: in politics, in love, in life. Not very.

Benjamin Markovits's novel The Syme Papers is published by Faber & Faber

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