Italy Down Under

C.S. Lewis once wrote that the idea for the Narnia books came to him from images: “a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen in a sledge, a magnificent lion.” From these mental pictures he created the Land of Narnia, a land populated with a rich diversity of beings, some very like their counterparts in our world, some derived from his knowledge and love of myth and fairy tale, and some, like Puddleglum, purely his own invention. [...]