Asia

We are four university professors, invited here in the year 2000 (we have started to use this number with a certain panache) for conferences and for negotiations concerning a possible world congress of the International Society for Comparative Literature – one from Germany,

All roads to the West go through Vienna. Generous crossroads where the western world fuses with the horizons of eastern Europe and the Germanic spirit seems to have rich confluences with Latinity, the old Austrian metropolis still conveys the same charm that those claras

excerptThat afternoon we took a train to Constanta where, the same evening, we planned to embark on a Romanian ship bound to Constantinople. We arrived in Constanta late at night, so we didn't get to see any of the city or port. All I remember is the very agitated sea.

excerptsVienna, December 1838 Extra Hungariam non est vita, si est vita, non est ita.  Vienna and Bucharest! Oh, what a difference between these two cities! Like the sun and the planets is this Capital surrounded by adequate corollaries stretching to the margins of the

When I set out to New Zealand, I had a tape recorder and a tape with the bells from Putna monastery. And during the long flight, from Bucharest to Wellington – approximately 30 hours on the plane, plus two stopovers – I would listen to the bells from Putna and to the

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.

For centuries now, every once in three years, The Feast of Immortality – Kumbh Mela, takes place alternatively in four Indian centers : Allahabad and Hardwar (Uttar Pradesh state), Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh) and Nasik (Maharashtra). Descending from Vedic mythology, the feast

Journeying to people instead of places is the reverse of the current, holiday-bound view on travels. Indeed, the projected picturesque of the surprising landscapes is the main constituent mesmerizing people into moving at great distances, sometimes despite the difficulties

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

The parallel journals of two travelers, separated by more than three centuries, who crossed Asia from the west to the east, following the same route to the capital of China, offers us a human measure of the passage of time. Double photographs of the same places, even the

excerptsThe greatest dream of my life, to see, with my very own eyes, the beauties and wonders of the tropical world, the hard nostalgia for those woods full of game from the Indian Archipelago, determined me to go on a hunting trip to Sumatra, together with my friend K.