The distinguished Italian poet Guido Gozzano (1883-1916) embarked for India in February 1912, ostensibly to treat his tuberculosis. His trip lasted three months and, all told, he spent six weeks on the subcontinent. His dispatches home for a newspaper are collected and published here in English for the first time.
In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.
In the autumn of 1834, Alexander Kinglake and John Savile set out together for Turkey and the Levant. When Savile was summoned home Kinglake, accompanied only by his guide and interpreter, went on by ship to Cyprus and Beirut, then to the Holy Land, Cairo, and Damascus. On his own in a foreign world, Kinglake used the solitary travel for prolonged self-scrutiny, and ultimately for liberation.
In the fall of 1928, thirty-five year-old Freya Stark set out on her first journey to the Middle East. She spent most of the next four years in Iraq and Persia, visiting ancient and medieval sites, and traveling alone through some of the wilder corners of the region.
Poet Henri Michaux boarded a ship for Ecuador in 1927 as "a man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal." The result is a work of pointed observation and sensual, even hallucinogenic, poetry and prose.
In 1935 Ella Maillart contemplated one of the most arduous journeys in the world: the "impossible journey" from Peking, then a part of Japanese-occupied China, through the distant province of Sinkiang (present day Tukestan), to Kashmir. Traveling along with newswriter Peter Fleming and also her companion Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Maillart undertook a journey considered almost beyond imagination for any European and doubly so for a woman.
Hills and the Sea, first published in 1906 to critical acclaim, collects thirty-eight of Hilaire Belloc's essays, spanning several periods of time and travel. The New York Times noted, "[This] book abounds in sweetness and light, and one must be something more than human or something less not to find therein some congenial and sympathetic message--possibly many."
First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive and exciting account of adventure travel. Captivated by the pagan quality of the mezzogiorno, Norman Douglas plunged into...
In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson set out on a walking tour of the Cévennes behind Modestine, the donkey that carried his baggage. The one hundred twenty-mile trip was through difficult country,...
This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travel in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Crete, and northern Italy, as well as...
