A Journey to Crete, Costantinople, Naples and Florence: Three Months Abroad

After years of raising children, a woman finally embarks on the journey of a lifetime with her new husband. Annie Vivanti's travel narrative captures the intoxicating moment when a mother steps off the pages of domestic life and into the ancient light of the Mediterranean. Beginning in Crete, where myths still cling to the landscape, she moves through Constantinople's labyrinthine bazaars and majestic mosques, then south to Naples' volcanic chaos, and finally to Florence's Renaissance grandeur. Vivanti writes with the hungry eyes of someone seeing the world for the first time: the scorching Grecian sun, the call to prayer echoing over the Bosphorus, the jarring vibrancy of Southern Europe after the grey chill of Brussels and Cologne. This is travel literature at its most personal, less concerned with monuments than with the feeling of being alive in strange places. For readers who crave the intimate, discursive pleasure of a clever companion's letters from abroad, or who wonder what it felt like to encounter the Ottoman Empire as a Victorian bride.