Category: Travel Writing

Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuscinski. “In 1955, just starting his career as a reporter, Kapuscinski wanted to travel just beyond the border of Poland. His editor sent him on assignment much farther afield, to China, Iran, and Africa, with a gift of Herodotus’ Histories. In this amazing memoir, Kapuscinski compares his own wanderings to those…

Siren Land, Norman Douglas. “Published in 1911…Siren Land describes and celebrates the region around Naples, particularly the Sorrento Peninsula and the island of Capri. It was in this region in 1888 that Douglas, a Scot born in Austria, had first experienced Italy and the Mediterranean, and it was here that he had settled in 1897….…

Classical Landscape With Figures, Osbert Lancaster. “In 1944 Lancaster packed his criteria and went off to Greece, where the British government had assigned him to the Athens embassy as first secretary. After 18 months he returned to London with his standards …a sheaf of sketches of what he had seen. The result is a handsomely…

Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay. “Imagination, irony, an appetite for travel and an enchantment with the past are the hallmarks of Rose Macaulay’s classic study…. She takes us on a journey through four continents, from Egyptian Thebes¾‘so old that no one remembers its beginnings’¾to Corinth, the gold San Francisco of the ancient world; from Pompeii,…

Rome and a Villa, Eleanor Clark. “In 1947 a young American woman…went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But Rome had its way with her, the novel was abandoned, and what followed…was a series of a sketches of Roman life” (publisher’s blurb).

My Family and Other Animals. Gerald Durrell. “When the unconventional Durrell family can no longer endure the damp, gray English climate, they do what any sensible family would do: sell their house and relocate to the sunny Greek isle of Corfu. My Family and Other Animals was intended to embrace the natural history of the…

Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens, Sofka Zinovieff. “A beguiling blend of autobiography and travel swirled into a portrait of a city and a meditation on Greekness” (Daily Telegraph). “A modest and a magnificently well-judged book, which anyone thinking of an Athenian trip ought to read.” (TLS). “More than travel writing, this is a story…

The Villa Ariadne, Dilys Powell. “Built in 1906, The Villa Ariadne was used as living quarters by the great archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, during his excavations of Knossos, the fabled palace of King Minos on the island of Crete. Donated by Evans to the British Archaeological School in Athens, the Villa was home to many…

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, Patrick Leigh Fermor. “Mani describes a journey by foot, mule and caique from Sparta to Cape Matapan, and then back up the coast to Gytheion. A climb through the precipitous spikes of the Taygetus Mountains reveals an isolated peninsula whose strange tower houses still ring with the memories of…

Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece, Patricia Storace. “‘I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint.’” So begins Patricia Storace’s astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West” (publisher’s blurb).