A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents A Cure for Serpents: A Doctor in Africa is a 1955 travel book by Alberto Denti di Pirajno, later the Duke of Pirajno, an Italian doctor, writer and former colonial governor of Tripoli. Set in Libya, Ethiopia and Somaliland, the book is a collection of anecdotes about various places he visited in his work as a physician in North Africa in the 1920s and the people he met, which includes tribal chieftains, Berber princes, courtesans and Tuareg tribesmen and of a lioness, which became part pet and part guard. The book was translated into English in
A Room with a View and describes a young English woman's first visit to Florence, at a time when upper middle class English women were starting to lead more independent, adventurous lives. Miss Lucy Honeychurch is touring Italy with her overly fussy and priggish but often ineffective older cousin and chaperone, Miss Charlotte Bartlett. The novel opens with their complaints about the pension where they are staying, the Pension Bertolini, at which rooms with a view of the River Arno had been promised, but which instead overlook a drab courtyard. One of the guests at the pension, Mr Emerson, interrupts their "peevish wrangling" by spontaneously