The Peregrinations Continue

'When all is said and done, there are two types of men: those who stay at home and those who do not'  Rudyard Kipling

Vernazza, as seen above, is part of the Cinque Terre (five towns) on the northwest coast of Italy and is a very popular tourist destination these days and may have been part of the historic Grand Tour. This Grand Tour often included Venice, Rome, Naples, Florence, Sienna, parts of France and Spain, and other destinations seen as contributing to a gentleman's (primarily) classic education including culture, art, and politics. This Tour was taken by aristocratic (read mostly wealthy) British, French, and German travelers and flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries until the upheavals (wars) of the early 1800s.

The Gulf of Poets (Italy)

The Gulf of La Spezia (also known as the Gulf of Poets) is located nearby to Cinque Terre at the easternmost point of the region of Liguria. It is part of the northern Tyrrhenian Sea, specifically the Ligurian Sea, and is named after the city of La Spezia, which is located at its middle point.

The Gulf of Poets is so named after some famous inhabitants including Lord George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe, and Mary Shelley. At an earlier time Dante  Alighieri (The Divine Comedy - Inferno) and Petrarch, an early Renaissance poet and Humanist lived there.

In my previous newsletter, I touched on the noted travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 'Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure', author Artemis Cooper notes that Fermor's favorite travel book was 'Old Calabria' by Norman Douglas who wrote a number of travel-related books in the early 1900s. A more recent related book is 'Calabria: The Other Italy' by Karen Haid.

A description from the publisher of Old Calabria: "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)".

After reading Old Calabria, I am still truly amazed by the number of references that Douglas makes about the history of that area, including the waves of 'invaders' through the Romans, the Greeks, the Saracens, and the Albanians, as well as his knowledge of the underlying religions, gods, etc., and even the climate change to that point of time in Calabria. He apparently genuinely trekked through most of that area of Southern Italy by foot and sometimes if he was 'lucky' by oxen cart. Talk about wandering!

Old Calabria is available free as an EBook from Project Gutenberg.

Richard Grant's Top 10 Books About Wandering

Richard Grant is a freelance journalist based in Arizona and the author of Ghost Riders: Travels With American Nomads

• Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (In my library). As an aside this adventure is noted in the book Indigenous Continent (see note below)
• The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (in Australia)
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy   (Read)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain   (Read. In my library)
• Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger   (Read. In my library)
• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey   (Read. In my library)
• Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas by Mari Sandoz
• Across the Wide Missouri by Bernard DeVoto
• Desierto: Memories of the Future by Charles Bowden
• Great Plains by Ian Frazier   (In my library)

One book that is often mentioned when you search for travel/adventure books of all time is Robert Byron's 'The Road to Oxiana' (published in 1937) and another that I have enjoyed is 'Tracks' by Robyn Davidson of her travels through 1700 miles of Australian Desert by camel. I have read both and have them in my library.

"Why do men wander rather than stand still?" asked Bruce Chatwin in 'The Nomadic Alternative'- though it was never published apparently.

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin

What's In Your Kindle? Coming soon!

In My Current Book Bag

Non-Fiction Books

• Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen  (Read. A very interesting read!)
• River Kings by Cat Jarman
• G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage
• Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America by Jeremy Jennings
• A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan (Read)
• M. Son of the Century (Mussolini) by Antonio Scurati (Read)
• Where To From Here by Bill Morneau (Read. Not sure what to make of it!)

Novels

• Herzog by Saul Bellow
• Skin by Mo Hayder (Read)
• The Girl By The Bridge by Arnaldur Indrioason (Read)
• Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane (Read)

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World

A New York Times article on 27 June 2023, by Nicolas Rapold, outlines this new documentary about the man and his libraries (books of course!). Check out the trailer available on YouTube below:

'A Library is both symbol and reality of universal memory' Umberto Eco

'When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us' by Alexander Graham Bell