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 Calabria, the southernmost and most backward part of Italy (a province that was still largely devoid of any form of modern amenity). He endured extremes of climate, scaled mountains, rode in carriages driven by villainous coachmen, and traversed remote stretches of country where murderous groups of banditti were known to roam. As Jon Manchip White points out in his introduction, it "makes good reading, but it...

In the late 1890s, John Synge, in his middle twenties and unsure of his vocation, made his way to Paris to study French literature and become a literary critic. There he met William Butler Yeats. The eminent poet advised Synge to drop his involvement with fin de siecle French authors, return to Ireland, and describe a society with which he had a natural connection.
Synge first traveled to the primitive, little-known Aran Islands in 1898. His trip proved to be a wonderfully fruitful and decisive experience. He then went back for part of each summer until 1902. "The Aran Islands, " his...

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.
"Eothen" has the freshness of the immediate and the new. Kinglake kept it free of the details of geography, history, science, politics, religion, and statistics; it is far less about the countries...

R. B. Cunninghame Graham's trek into the Moroccan interior beyond Marrakesh is a classic example of British adventure travel. His ostensible purpose was to reach the forbidden city of Tarudant, where it was claimed no Christian had ever set foot, and which he attempted while variously disguised as a Turkish doctor and a sheikh from Fez. In the end, Cunninghame Graham's mission was a failure: halfway to his goal, he was captured and held prisoner for four months in the medieval castle of Kintafi in the Atlas Mountains. But his loss was the reader's gain, as Edward Garnet points out in his...

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 an extended essay on Egypt--where, when he was 24, Butor spent a year teaching French in a secondary school. Michel Butor is one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s .

"Traduced by malice, persecuted by fiction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity," Tobias Smollett set off on a journey through France and Italy to relieve his despair. While there, he wrote regularly to his friends, and the result is this fascinating, wholeheartedly personal account of places and he encountered.
"Travels through France and Italy" is a landmark work in travel literature. Full of prejudice, grousing, sharp observation, and caustic satire, it is the first travel book in modern literature to go beyond the simple conveyance of...

Arthur Symons's collection of twenty-six essays on travel in Spain, life in London, and sojourns among islands and sea-coasts of France, England, and Ireland first appeared in the United States in 1919. In The New Republic, noted writer and critic Padraic Colum remarked that "it is not an artist's sketch-book nor is it a writer's note-book: it is a book in which the most remarkable of the impressionist writers, and the one. with the most singular curiosity, gives finished studies of places that for him have history". Symons's verbal portraits of these places, whether bold and colorful or...

The story of a seven-month journey taken in 1935 from Peking to Kashmir.

"All writers risk their identities, some with each sentence. But abroad, writing about a life that can't help but seem elusive, the charlatan in oneself may feel all too exposed. Limited to the surface, to the most fortuitous of impressions, how can a foreign pair of eyes hope to pen anything that can vie with something an insider, born there, carrying that landscape in his bones, might write?"
For more than four decades, poet Robin Magowan has journeyed in search of ecstatic spiritual experiences. Hitchhiking and walking, by bus or boat or when necessary by horse, he has explored lands...