Tag Archives: Rome

What Is Your Alibi For Travel?

Destination: Rome, New York City, Tuscany, Paris, Barcelona, Alexandria Egypt

Book Cover

Book: Alibis:Essays on Elsewhere by André Aciman

André Aciman travels with a very different mindset than you and I.  We are going away from our home to a different place.  He agrees with T.S. Eliot, who said, “The end is where we start from.”

A journey, he says, always is FROM somewhere. But in his case, home is elsewhere in time. Since it is difficult to pin down where he comes from–anywhere he goes is also elsewhere.  His essays play with the idea of memory of place, trying to recover the past, fiction that sneaks into memoir, and the time-bending quality of anticipation. Continue reading What Is Your Alibi For Travel?

30 Days to Change Your Life

St. Francis' olive grove, Assissi
Italian Olive Grove

Destination: Italy

Book Cover: A Month in Italy
Book: A Month of Italy: Rediscovering the Art of Vacation (NEW 2012) by Chris Brady

This book alternately amused me and annoyed me.  The subject is promising–a family of six, already widely traveled, decides to get away from the pressure of everyday life in America for a month in Italy. Continue reading 30 Days to Change Your Life

Dickens in Italy

Destinations: France and Italy (1844)

Book: Pictures From Italy by Charles Dickens (1846)

Reading Dickens’ descriptions of travel by coach and steamboat should put to a halt any modern grousing about minor inconveniences like Ziploc bags and barefoot security queues. It was such a chore to arrange for the travel of his party of twelve, that he hired a Frenchman as a Courier.  This man  smooths the way through customs, haggles with the landlords, and makes sure there will be meals to eat and horses to pull the coach.

Even so, in Pictures from Italy, (Free on Kindle) Dickens regales us with the condition of the roads–generally muddy and narrow; the sleeping arrangements–sometimes flea-ridden and generally drafty and the people he meets along the way–characters of a Dickensian quality, every one.

Lanterna
Lanterna, The symbol of Genoa, Italy

Perhaps it is the timeless rivalry between France and England that influences his carping about France.  He dismisses Chalon as too flat. After taking an 8-hour trip by steamboat to Lyons, he describes that city in paragraphs packed with dreary adjectives, dissing even the cathedral, where he finds the stone walls as dirty as the pavement.   But he admires Avignon…”The streets old and narrow, but tolerably clean…..quaint and lively.” His mood is unquestionably better because he is traveling in July through summer heat and in Avignon a breeze has come up. Continue reading Dickens in Italy