Valentine’s Day is coming up. It is unavoidable. I might as well write about it in terms of books and travel.
Romantic Bookmark
Here are my random choices of romantic things.
Most romantic couple: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning
Most romantic city: Florence (And the Brownings just happened to live there!
Most romantic line of poetry: I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach….
Most romantic book about travel I have read: Eat, Love, Pray
Most romantic restaurant I have eaten in: Rainforest Hideaway, Marigot Bay, St. Lucia
Most romantic hotel I ever stayed in: Princess Village, Koh Samui Thailand (Unfortunately now gone upscale as the LeParadis Boutique Resort and Spa. Ahh, you not only can’t go home again, you can’t go Koh Samui again.)
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Here’s a little gift for your Valentine:
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways
By Elizabeth Barret Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Okay, now it is your turn. Tell me your favorites in all these categories, and we’ll keep talking romance for a while. Quite honestly, I need more recommendations for romantic travel books.
Photograph by “goranpg” from Flickr, Creative Commons license
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Tags: book, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence, hotel, Koh Samui, poetry, restaurant, Robert Browning, romance, St. Lucia, Valentine
Regarding your question about impressions of modern Greece, it may be true that at times (hopefully rare) when you’re there you can’t wait to go home so you can miss it fondly. Perhaps everyone but Xerxes has felt this way. It’s hard to romanticize any place when you’re actually there. As the seedbed of Western civilization, there is no country more romanticised than Greece. It is our idealized other Eden as we like to think it was in the best days of Pericles when Athens was a “shining lamp on a hill.” The lamp may now be smog-dimmed and the hill littered, but in absentia it glows golden. That’s sufficient.
How about Dante’s La Vita Nuova for romantic poetry?
Romantic Book: Jim Dodge Not Fade Away
I have to think about most romantic city. ;^)
Thanks for sharing!
Richard
Twitter: pen4hire
says:
Richard: I think you have a strange idea of romance. Fade Away looks like a good road trip book, though.
I can’t believe this cateogry isn’t flushed with more options! May be its too perfect a tale – what you went to this exotic place and also found love?
I recently read an article on an in-flight magzine, a chic-lit author asking for romance-on-travel stories. think she may be working on a plot herself!
I would suggest a Georgette Heyer or a Daphne Du Maurier … not exactly travel, though!