The innocents abroad
“Day after day and night after night we have wandered among the crumbling wonders of Rome; day after day and night after night we have fed upon the dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries — have brooded over them by day and dreamt of them by night till sometimes we seemed mouldering aways ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment to fall prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and “restored” with an unseemly nose, and labelled wrong and dated wrong, and set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble their names on forever and forevermore.”
In 1867 Mark Twain embarked on a tour of Europe and the Middle East which would open his eyes, touch his heart, engage his imagination, and in- spire one of the finest travel books ever written, the classic The Innocents Abroad. He went as a newspaper correspondent reporting to the New York Tribune and the San Francisco Daily Alto California and wrote about The innocents abroad
The extensive voyage that Mark Twain, then age 32, took aboard the pleasure cruiser ‘Quaker City’ took about five months. I was surprised about that relatively short time period because when reading about all those sights and extensive excursions you feel that it must have taken such a long period of time. To me, it felt like the journey must have taken at least a year.
All 65 passengers on board had never been to Europe before. In contrast, the Europeans had only seen an occasional American now and then, so the Americans themselves were considered quite a sight as well.
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