Paris

You will be totally shocked! You will live a unique experience! You will have nothing to regret! Japan is not like other countries. These are not just some sentences whispered by friends or statements made by colleagues. They were my suppositions before leaving for Japan.

excerptI will never forget the nights spent with Bogdanof and Van Manen around Calcutta, in Serampore and Titagarh. Bogdanof, who had been the consul of the Tsarist Empire to Teheran and Kabul for ten years, was at the time my teacher of Persian. He had made friends with

Sometime in April the old and refined Victorianist Robert Langbaum came to Virginia in order to hold a conference at our university. Going out for a meal, I mentioned that I was going to spend a week in Hong Kong at the beginning of May for professional purposes. He answered

A visit which lasts barely a week, spent most of the time in meeting and conference rooms or on the plane, cannot possibly be conclusive. You are astonished by the gentle, harmonious and calming lines of the roofs in the beautiful Forbidden City of the former emperors. You

You do not need a passport to travel to Egypt or to any other English colony. A visit card will do. In Alexandria, I made friends with the tropical flora: date trees that bear almost 100 kg of fruit each year, bananas or the cursed fruits because they grow without any effort

excerptIn 1898, at the general assembly of the Romanian Geographic Society, its general secretary, George I. Lahovary, presenting a report on the activities performed the previous year, remarked that the Romanians had lately undertaken travels and even explorations of some

*I intended to be concerned with literary form in this series of reportage. I can see I have done better than I expected. At the moment, my problem is preserving the chronological order of events. Our departure from Odessa was marked by a small, insignificant in fact, incident,

The history of a country's libraries is made not only of facts and events related to large (or smaller) institutions, but also of phenomena that illustrate the taste for books and bibliophily of particular individuals, especially when such libraries come to be included

The Romanian Peasant's Museum Motto: A photo is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.  At the beginning of the 20th century, Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaş1 was wandering around the villages of Oltenia and Bucovina, looking for folk art objects.

Alongside collectors of art works, of minerals, of butterflies, of match-boxes, of vintage automobiles, there appeared, in the early 20th century, collectors of naïve art. Daring, of good taste, discoverers by vocation, they granted civitas rights to a field as old as the

Shortly after World War I a new name amidst art collectors in the know started to compel recognition: that of poet Ion Minulescu. At that time, more intensely than in previous years, he would, due among others to his obligations as Director General of the Arts, visit exhibitions,

excerpts IV In his office on the ground floor, Saferian, on a chair and surrounded by four men, all standing, was contemplating an oil portrait, set near them against the back of an ordinary straw chair. It is an Ingres, most certainly, said one of the four, a man with trimmed