Nic

excerptAbout the Earth's Crust A loud knock on the door of the cabin disturbs my sweet morning sleep. Gibrelterra!… Gibrelterra!… I rub my eyes sleepily and, without understanding anything, I ask stroppily: what is it? what's happened?Gibrelterra!…We can

excerpt In 1846, M. Kogalniceanu travels to France and Spain (Notes sur l'Espagne). The recollection of Moldavia lingers with him at the opposite end of the continent. I have studied Spain a great deal, he writes to I. Ghica, a very curious country whose language,

Lisbon, a town whose name comes from the mythical traveler Ulysses – so they say – , illustrated in the Middle Ages by so many navigators and explorers curious and eager for adventure, shows to the visitor first its drowsy side. It is true that I first visited it on

I cannot think of a more fortunate coincidence: this is the first time I have visited Paris in May and the show is extraordinary. I know somebody who keeps a dried chestnut flower between the covers of a notebook, a flower that he has picked up from the sidewalk in Cluny

We are stepping in on a realm of legend. My reader undoubtedly knows the thrill of finding himself in places bearing a special aura. Something memorable has occurred there. Not necessarily a glorious, heroic deed, a moment of history, but an act of spirit (pardon my grandiloquence!)

excerpts30th September When I get on the tram, in Zurich, I cross myself. To whom? Not to the tram, of course, but to the Power that gave some people (engineers, technicians, workers) the ability to create such public means of transportation: and to others (the passengers)

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

The 'Dinicu Golescu complex' and its fecund implications. Years later, in order to certify – and prove to himself – the loss of complexes by the Romanian traveler, Adrian Marino subtitles his 'anti-diary' European Notebooks (1976): Notes on My Travel

(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.

It's not about a simple leap, but a process. The way from the Big Wheel of Prater to the De Lorean of Back to the Future goes through numerous crucial moments. I experienced one at Universal Studios before I embarked on the vehicle that flies in time and space standing