Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of EducationBates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
History
Touring in 1600: A Study in the Development of Travel as a Means of Education
Bates, E. S. (Ernest Stuart)
Europe -- Description and travel; Europe -- Social life and customs; Travel -- History
Thus he became Pietro della Valle, "Il Pellegrino" (the Pilgrim); and
started. Venice, Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, was his
route; but his next letter thereafter is "from my tent in the desert":
he has disappeared over the tourist horizon, and become a traveller on
the grand scale. But he returns, and has much to say on the way back.
Meanwhile, in Babylon, he has met another lady-love, Maani Gioerida,
eighteen years old, daughter of an Assyrian father and an Armenian
mother. Marriage with her was soon followed by her death; for the
remaining four years of his wanderings he carried her body with him,
laying it to rest in the end in his family tomb: and married again,
this time the girl who had attended his first wife, alive and dead,
Maria Tinatin di Ziba, a Georgian. And with her he lived happy ever
after, and by her had fourteen sons.
Another type of traveller is the philosopher philosophizing. Sir Henry
Blount set four particular aims before himself when he started for
southeastern Europe with the intention of increasing his knowledge
of things human, choosing the southeast because the west too closely
resembled England. He went to note, first, the characteristics of
"the religion, manners, and policy of the Turks" in so far as these
threw light on the question whether they were, as reputed, barbarous,
or possessed of a different variety of civilisation. Secondly, to
satisfy the interest he felt in the subject-races, especially Jews;
thirdly, to study the Turkish army about to set out for Poland; and
fourthly, Cairo, which being the largest city existing, or on record,
had problems of its own whose solutions he wished to note, much as
foreigners might come to study London County Council doings now. This
was in 1634.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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