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excerptFor various reasons, travel became a fashionable experience at the beginning of the 19th century all over the Europe. Even Spain, originally a destination country for foreign travelers, mainly from Britain, is invaded by the mania de viajar; the Spanish playwright

(Constantin Golescu, Notes on My Travel, drawn up in 1824, 1825, 1826. Reprinted and accompanied by an introduction by Nerva Hodos, Bucharest, 1910)excerptsWhen today a Romanian travels in all European comfort, by railway; when he can, even without changing car, get to Paris

excerptsWhen you arrive in Frankfurt, coming from Eastern Europe, you find too little of what you knew about Germany from the readings of its great writers. Another world, other values, another history. A civilisation of concrete and of computers. It is only when you arrive

The news that a German foundation offered me, many years ago, a scholarship to Heidelberg gave me an incommensurable joy and an unrestrained curiosity of knowing places that, for a very long time, I could only associate with the plot of Wilhelm Meyer Förster's play.

All roads to the West go through Vienna. Generous crossroads where the western world fuses with the horizons of eastern Europe and the Germanic spirit seems to have rich confluences with Latinity, the old Austrian metropolis still conveys the same charm that those claras

excerptThat afternoon we took a train to Constanta where, the same evening, we planned to embark on a Romanian ship bound to Constantinople. We arrived in Constanta late at night, so we didn't get to see any of the city or port. All I remember is the very agitated sea.

excerptsThe 18th of March. Depressing weather in Berlin, yet I'm not depressed, only sleepy, in spite of a coffee and a lot of bitter chocolate. Coming back from Italy is like waking up from a Paradise dream or from a heroin trip and finding again those four walls of

Noticing this peculiarity of the traveler abroad, the great institutions, from governments to tourist companies, established tariffs according to the altitude. Climbing the stairs up to the top of Saint Peter cathedral in Rome costs 5000 Italian pounds. Climbing up to 1900

Chapter XLV – How to TravelTraveling is a spiritual need of everybody: our life actually ends with a trip that we are so sorry we have to take in mourning and without companions, leaving the body to which our soul, which is in fact ourselves, was so much connected. We

excerptsVienna, December 1838 Extra Hungariam non est vita, si est vita, non est ita.  Vienna and Bucharest! Oh, what a difference between these two cities! Like the sun and the planets is this Capital surrounded by adequate corollaries stretching to the margins of the

The space of Travel is – may be, also a mythical space. In the Archipelago, the sea is filled with mythological rumors. The Mountain, as a colossal genius of the Narrative, partakes in countless secret stories (A. Russo). Arcana of the past, ruins are fragments which

excerptsThe most dazzling phenomenon of the long Finnish winter night is the polar lights. The fantastical miracles that move profoundly the foreign traveler, they also impress the local people, who watch them in ecstasy like some genuine miracles of nature. The most impressive