New Glarus, Wisconsin, is a village of 2,247 residents that takes pride in being known as “America’s Little Switzerland.” Located 30 miles southwest of Madison, the community supports a männerchor (men’s choir), kinderchor (youth choir) and jodlerklub (choir of yodelers). The mournful sound of meters-long alphorns (used long ago by the Swiss to call cattle…
A farmer’s work never really ends, but there are a few breaks in the action, particularly when autumn harvest season winds down. The harvest season is a time of celebration – both literal and psychological –…
People have been knocking back beers together for 6,000 years. The planet’s oldest known recipe comes from Mesopotamia in today’s Southern Iraq. It provides directions on how to turn old bread crusts into a thick, dark,…
I went to Japan some 40 years ago to write travel articles but ended up staying a couple of years, first as editor of a travel magazine published in Tokyo and then to write the first…
Tennessee has two products that are famous around the world – country music from Nashville and Jack Daniel’s Whiskey from the tiny town of Lynchburg about 80 miles south of Nashville and 25 miles north of…
Editor & Senior Correspondent
In Lhasa’s Barkhor Square, the weathered Tibetan woman softly intoning a Buddhist mantra fell to…
There are more than 2.2 billion Christians throughout the world and during the month of…
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Publisher WW Norton & Company | Reviewed by Nancy Wigston
Pack your bags, saddle your horses, load your stores of wine—not forgetting your final will and testament—for we’re off to the Middle Ages with the most excellent guide, Anthony Bale, a professor of medieval studies at the University of London’s Birkbeck College. This deeply intriguing piece of historical detective work enlightens us about our travelling forebears while inevitably unearthing our own travel memories. But first, what did the world look like in 1491? By the late 1400s, mass tourism had attracted travelers very like us to foreign, especially religious, sites. Travel offered many benefits, from escaping troubles at home to receiving saints’ blessings, and earning indulgences—reprieves for one’s allotted time in Purgatory. A very holy site like Jerusalem granted Christians plenary indulgences, wiping clean their upcoming years in Purgatory. In 1300, a Jubilee Year, a million people came to Rome to be absolved of sins. As travellers proceeded to Jaffa along the coast, many kept travel diaries describing their quarters often lively with rats. Read More
