The Traces is a ranging inquiry into the seductions of memory and travel, the fragile paradox of desire, and the art of making meaning from a life. Mairead Small Stead's debut, The Traces is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.