This is the annotated edition including a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, as well as an introductory to the book written by George Parsons Lathrop.

In Hawthorne's "French and Italian Note-Books" the daily experience of his Italian sojourn, and the mute life of painting and sculpture as it stood to be reviewed by his eye, are set down precisely as they presented themselves to him at the time. They end the series of Hawthorne's journals; since, on his return to America, the Civil War so absorbed his thoughts that he was unable to continue memoranda of this kind.