A Tramp Abroad

Books | Film | Vesuvio

10 Ianuarius 2023

Tweet

For the past year or so I've been tramping about Europe and reading Mark Twain's humorous traveloge, A Tramp Abroad. It's especially good on trains. As Twain mixes the details of places along with absurdities one is somehow left with accurate images of the feeling of a place. The book focuses on Deutschland and Switzerland, places I've spent a deal of time exploring the past year and yet there's still so much to see! Strange how separated by a century and a half my American eyes see Europe so similarly to Twain.

"The Cathedral itself had seemed very old; but this picture was illustrating a period in history which made the building seem young by comparison. But I presently found an antique which was older than either the battered Cathedral or the date assigned to that piece of history; it was a spiral- shaped fossil as large as the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench, and had been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth. Contrasted with the inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were flippantly modern—jejune—mere matters of day-before-yesterday. The sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away under the influence of this truly venerable presence." - Twain on St. Mark's in Venice