I do not think of reading and travel as two separate pleasures that occasionally overlap. They are the same impulse — the hunger to be somewhere other than where you started, to understand a place from the inside, to let an unfamiliar world rearrange something in you.
Books have taken me to cities I have never physically visited and made me feel I knew their light, their rhythms, the particular weight of their afternoons. And travel has sent me straight back to books — to writers who understood a place more deeply than I could in a week, whose sentences gave me back the thing I had only half-seen when I was standing in it.
Literary Travels is where I document that exchange. Reading lists built around countries, cities, and landscapes. Essays on the books that first made me want to go somewhere — and the ones I read after, to understand where I had been. The ongoing conversation between a story and its setting, between a place and the literature it produces, between the world outside the window and the one inside the page.
This is how I travel most often and most deeply. I hope some of it takes you somewhere too.
Brussels by Night: Grand-Place Lights, Jacques Brel & Gaufres de Bruxelles
Passport to Italy: 10 Books for the Perfect Armchair Escape
Tales of an Italian Life
A Coastal Reading Ritual Among Fossils and Salt
Echoes of Grace
On commitments in Reading
Mesopotamian Dreams: Echoes of Babylon and Lapis Blue
A Reader’s Lantern Festival Celebrations
