The Lands of the Saracen: Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain

In 1854, a young American named Bayard Taylor set out to traverse the lands the Europeans still called Saracen: the sun-baked coasts of Palestine, the ruins of Asia Minor, the Norman churches of Sicily, and the Alhambra's shadowed courtyards of Spain. This is his account of that journey, rendered in the muscular, Romantic prose of Victorian exploration. Taylor arrives in Beirut and finds himself imprisoned in quarantine, staring at the vibrant world beyond the gate like a man denied paradise. Once released, he wanders through ancient cities still thick with the debris and grandeur of empires: Roman columns thrusting from Syrian fields, the ruined theaters of Ephesus, the craggy fastnesses where once the Moorish kingdoms fell. He is an American abroad in the old world, simultaneously awestruck and critical, eager to see and determined to understand. The book captures a vanished era of travel: before photography, before mass tourism, when crossing the Mediterranean still required weeks of sea sickness and the patience of quarantine. For readers who long for the romance of slow travel and the pleasure of watching a sharp-eyed observer make sense of the ancient world.