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Some of the best gifts aren't particularly extravagant. They're the ones that show you've been paying attention.

A beautiful book about Italy for someone who still talks about their trip to Florence. A novel set in Japan for a friend planning a visit to Tokyo. A cookbook filled with the flavors of Mexico for someone who fell in love with the food on their last vacation. That's what makes travel books such wonderful holiday gifts. They're thoughtful, personal, and full of possibility. They can bring back wonderful memories, introduce us to unfamiliar places, and sometimes inspire an adventure we never imagined taking.

And there's something special about giving someone a beautiful book they can enjoy for years to come.

Finding the Perfect Travel Book

The secret is to think about the person first, and the book second. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Celebrate a trip they'll never forget. Did your parents spend their anniversary in Paris? A gorgeous photography book about the city might be perfect. Did a friend just return from hiking in Patagonia? Find a book about the region's spectacular landscapes. A beautiful book about a favorite destination can be a wonderful souvenir, even years after the trip.

Inspire their next great adventure. For someone dreaming of an African safari, consider a photography book celebrating the wildlife of the Serengeti. For an adventurous traveler, Atlas Obscura is packed with remarkable places they've probably never heard of. And for someone planning a trip, don't overlook a great guidebook. Our advice: choose one focused on the specific destination. A guide to Barcelona is often more useful, and more personal, than a general guide to Spain.

Give them something beautiful. Few gifts make quite the impression of a gorgeous coffee table book. Assouline's luxurious destination books are among our favorites. For someone who loves exploring the world, Lonely Planet's The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World is a photographic celebration of countries across the globe, while National Geographic's World's Best Travel Experiences: 400 Extraordinary Places is packed with spectacular destinations and inspiration for future adventures. They're the kind of books you'll want to leave out and return to again and again.

Give them a great story. Some of the best travel books take you along for the ride. Join Anthony Bourdain as he eats his way around the world in A Cook's Tour, experience the romance of overnight trains in Monisha Rajesh's Moonlight Express, or explore Australia with Bill Bryson's wonderfully funny In a Sunburned Country. A great travel story can make you laugh, introduce you to unforgettable people, and leave you dreaming about your own next adventure.

Travel through the pages of a novel. Fiction can transport us just as powerfully as any travel memoir. Shantaram immerses readers in the chaotic streets and hidden worlds of Mumbai, while Where the Crawdads Sing brings the beautiful, mysterious marshlands of North Carolina to life. For historical fiction lovers, Robert Harris's Pompeii takes readers back to ancient Rome and the terrifying eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Sometimes a great novel is all it takes to fall in love with a place.

Bring the flavors of the world home. A beautiful cookbook is one of our favorite gifts, especially when there's a personal connection. Think handmade pasta for someone who loved Bologna, Mexican cooking for a friend who visited Oaxaca, or a collection of Thai recipes for someone still reminiscing about Bangkok's street food. The best cookbooks offer more than recipes. They tell stories about places, traditions, and the people who keep them alive.

Don't forget the kids! Books are one of the very best ways to introduce children to the wider world. An illustrated atlas can inspire hours of discovery, while a story set in another country can make unfamiliar places feel wonderfully exciting. We especially love Aaron Becker's wordless picture book Journey for younger readers. For older children, look for adventure stories, geography books, and fascinating accounts of real explorers. Who knows where that curiosity might lead?

A Little Something Extra

One final suggestion: write a personal note inside the cover. Tell the recipient why you chose the book, what you remember about a trip you shared, or why you hope they'll visit a particular place someday. It's a small gesture that can turn a lovely present into a treasured keepsake.

This holiday season, give someone a good book and a little inspiration to explore. Whether it takes them back to somewhere they love or introduces them to a place they've never considered, it's a gift that can keep giving long after the decorations come down.

Looking for more inspiration? Explore our favorite travel books to give as gifts.

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By Ingrid Hedman

Guest contributor Ingrid Hedman is a Swedish journalist, author, and passionate traveler who believes that the best way to discover a place is through the people who live there. Her latest book, Sofas & Strangers, chronicles a month-long journey across Europe, exploring local cultures through the homes and stories of strangers.

Back in 2011, I hosted 35 travellers from all over the world on my sofa in my one-bedroom flat in Stockholm. There were families. Couples. Solo travellers. Some stayed for just a couple of nights, others for a whole week. I remember how we used to sit down for coffee and a chat together. Sometimes we had breakfast, and I often invited them to join me for a typical Swedish dinner. They appreciated being able to hear about Sweden and Stockholm from a local’s perspective – things they would never have learnt had they stayed in a hotel. We talked about Swedish politics, customs and unwritten social rules. I gave them tips on everything from flea markets and the best bars to the loveliest walking routes around the city.

It was fantastic. I had the opportunity to travel the world and get to know other cultures without even having to leave my own flat. We had so many fascinating and intimate conversations, and I am still in touch with several of the people who stayed with me back then, 15 years ago. These encounters eventually inspired my book The Whole World on My Couch (Carlsson Publishing, 2013).

Yet I was often met with surprise and scepticism from friends and family. How could I let complete strangers into the most sacred place of all – my own home? What if they stole something? What if they turned out to be violent or difficult in some way? And just imagine having strangers sleeping in your own bedsheets, brushing their teeth in the same bathroom sink, having your home invaded by unknown people entering your private space. The very thought makes many people shudder.

Why Couchsurfing Makes Us Uncomfortable

Today, when my colleague Ylva Bergman and I travel around giving talks about our new book, Sofas & Strangers – about our journey by train and through Couchsurfing across six countries, staying in strangers’ homes for free together with my then 12 year old son Tim – we encounter exactly the same scepticism. When we ask the audience, “Has anyone here ever tried Couchsurfing?”, hardly anyone ever raises their hand. Being genuinely curious, we ask why people have never tried this way of travelling: staying completely free of charge in someone’s home, where a generous host offers you a bed, sofa or mattress, and saving yourself a considerable amount of money that would otherwise have gone on expensive hotels. The answers are often rather vague and hesitant, along the lines of, “Well, no, it’s not really my cup of tea.” It is almost as if people do not even want to consider giving it a try.

Are Swedes particularly reluctant to embrace this way of travelling? I would say they probably are. We Swedes need to feel safe and secure. We place greater value than many other nationalities on our personal space (just watch what happens when someone sits down next to another passenger on the bus, even though there are plenty of empty seats further away). We find it difficult to let new people into our lives and social circles (just ask anyone who has moved to Sweden and tried to make new friends). And when we go on holiday, we have often spent the whole year saving up so that we can splash out 2000-5000 euros on that one precious week away, when the whole point is to ENJOY OURSELVES rather than scrimp and save. We want to TREAT OURSELVES without risking anything going wrong or causing the slightest inconvenience.

But for those who dare to step outside their comfort zone, challenge their fear of the unfamiliar and take the chance to experience something genuinely different on their travels – perhaps even making friends for life along the way – we have written Sofas & Strangers. The book is packed with inspiration and practical tips on how Couchsurfing works, what to bear in mind and how to get the very most out of the experience.

During our month-long journey, we stayed in the homes of strangers in six countries: Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia and the Czech Republic. It was an incredible experience to meet these people and be trusted with their personal life stories. In Berlin, we stayed with Ekki, who was among the first people to cross over to the other side of Germany when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. He vividly described the dramatic events of a time when his country changed almost overnight. Visiting the city’s exhibition about the fall of the Berlin Wall became a much more personal and moving experience thanks to our host.

In Poland, we were welcomed into the home of a family with children whose sons were around the same age as my own son. Tim and the boys hit it off straight away, bonding over their shared love of computer games. I always recommend that families travelling with children consider staying with other families. Apart from perhaps feeling like a safer option, it can make the whole trip so much more enjoyable for your children.

During our stay in Budapest, we lived with a married gay couple and heard first-hand what it was like to live in a country with an openly homophobic government – a government that, thankfully, has since fallen. Their story was both fascinating and challenged many of our previous assumptions. Isn't it amazing what travelling can do to us? How it can genuinely broaden our horizons and change the way we see other cultures and the people who live in them.

In Slovenia, we had an entire sleeping loft to ourselves in the home of Jakob, a wonderful host who took his role as a host very seriously indeed. Jakob showed us around the little village of Kanal and turned out to be a walking encyclopaedia. We cooked traditional Slovenian dishes together, and we were even invited to join his family for a church service. When it was time to leave, we were all a little sad. It felt like saying goodbye to an old and dear friend.

Ending up at a doggy daycare centre in Croatia came as something of a surprise – but a very pleasant one, since we all love dogs! Spending time with the dogs and learning more about animal care in the country was both fun and fascinating. The couple we stayed with also entertained us with a whole collection of crazy stories, ranging from spiritual trips to tales of eccentric guests, including one guest who simply refused to leave.

Our journey ended in the Czech Republic, where we stayed with a Czech-American family on an organic farm in the countryside. We had found them through the WWOOF organisation. This may well have been the most wonderful and educational stay of them all. For a few days, we worked in the farm's garden and helped look after the animals – a real balm for the soul for us stressed-out city dwellers. The family told us how they had left behind their hectic, high-achieving lives and successful careers in America's big cities to make a complete change of direction and build a farm in the woman's home country. Our philosophical conversations touched me deeply and made me reflect on my own life and what really matters.

All these wonderful, educational, fascinating and thought-provoking encounters would probably never have happened if we had stayed in hotels.

For me, travelling has always been about meeting people and getting to know a culture from the inside. Not about ticking famous sights off a bucket list. I am far more interested in finding out how local people eat their breakfast or sort their rubbish for recycling than in going up the Eiffel Tower to take pictures for my Instagram account. And many of the hosts and guests I have stayed with or welcomed into my own home over the years are still my friends today, and I continue to keep in touch with them.

About the Author

Guest contributor Ingrid Hedman is a Swedish journalist, author, and passionate traveler who believes the best way to discover a destination is through its people. Together with fellow journalist Ylva Bergman, she wrote Sofas & Strangers, chronicling their month-long journey across six European countries, staying with local hosts and discovering new perspectives along the way. Learn more about their adventures and the book at www.sofasandstrangers.com.

Interested in reading Sofas & Strangers? Find the book on Amazon to discover more about their journey and the people they met along the way.

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From the mystery of the first expeditions to the tragedies and triumphs of modern mountaineering, these six books reveal the extraordinary human stories behind the world's highest mountain.

Rising 29,032 feet (8,849 meters) above sea level, Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth. Located in the Himalayas on the border between Nepal and Tibet, the mountain towers over a spectacular landscape of snow-covered peaks, deep valleys, and ancient Himalayan communities. Known as Sagarmatha in Nepal and Chomolungma in Tibet, Everest is both a sacred mountain and one of the world's most extraordinary destinations for exploration.

What is it about Mount Everest that makes people willing to risk everything to reach its summit? The question has fascinated adventurers, writers, and filmmakers for more than a century. And with the release of Everest: The Other Side, a new documentary from Oscar-winning filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the world's highest mountain is once again in the spotlight.

The film follows elite ski mountaineers Jim Morrison and Hilaree Nelson, whose shared dream was to climb Everest's formidable North Face and ski down one of the most dangerous slopes on Earth. It's a story of extraordinary ambition, love, and loss, set against some of the most spectacular mountain scenery imaginable.

But Everest's most compelling stories extend far beyond the summit.

There are the early explorers who disappeared into its clouds, the dreamers who attempted the impossible, the Sherpa families whose lives and traditions are inseparable from the mountain, and the modern adventurers who continue to test its limits.

For readers, Everest offers an extraordinary collection of true stories. These six books take us through nearly a century of climbing history, each revealing something different about the mountain and the people drawn to it.

The Everest Mystery, by Julie Summers and Jochen Hemmleb (2026)

The greatest unsolved mystery in mountaineering.

On June 8, 1924, two British climbers, George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, were spotted high on Mount Everest, still making their way toward the summit. Then they disappeared into the clouds. Neither man returned.

The mystery has haunted mountaineering ever since. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit nearly 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's historic ascent? Or did they turn back, defeated by the altitude and treacherous terrain? Mallory's body was discovered in 1999, but it offered no definitive answer. Irvine remained missing for another century.

Then, in September 2024, a National Geographic expedition led by filmmaker and climber Jimmy Chin discovered a boot and partial human remains, with a sock bearing Irvine's initials, emerging from the ice below Everest's North Face. The discovery brought renewed attention to one of the great mysteries of exploration.

In The Everest Mystery, published in 2026, Julie Summers, Irvine's great-niece, and mountaineering historian Jochen Hemmleb revisit the remarkable 1924 expedition. Drawing on historical research and new evidence, they bring Irvine out of Mallory's shadow, revealing a talented 22-year-old whose mechanical ingenuity and knowledge of oxygen equipment made him an important member of the expedition.

The result is both an adventure story and a historical detective story, filled with the personalities, rivalries, and extraordinary hardships of early Himalayan exploration. More than a century later, the question of whether Mallory and Irvine reached the top remains unanswered. Perhaps that is part of what makes their story so irresistible.

The Moth and the Mountain, by Ed Caesar (2020)

The astonishing story of a man who believed he could conquer Everest alone.

If Mallory and Irvine represent the heroic age of organized exploration, Maurice Wilson represents something altogether stranger.

In 1933, Wilson, a British World War I veteran with almost no mountaineering experience and limited flying skills, hatched an audacious plan. He would fly a small Gipsy Moth biplane from England toward Everest, crash-land on the mountain's lower slopes, and climb to the summit alone. It was a scheme so improbable that British authorities tried to stop him.

Wilson flew as far as India, then continued toward Everest on foot, eventually entering Tibet in disguise. With the assistance of three Sherpas, he reached the mountain and began his attempt. He never returned.

In The Moth and the Mountain, journalist Ed Caesar reconstructs Wilson's extraordinary adventure while exploring the troubled life that drove him toward such a dangerous undertaking. Wilson had survived the horrors of World War I, struggled with relationships and depression, and become convinced that faith, fasting, and sheer determination could carry him to the world's highest point.

His story is sometimes absurd, often heartbreaking, and remarkably human. Caesar doesn't simply celebrate Wilson's courage; he asks what happens when personal redemption becomes tangled up with an impossible dream.

It's one of Everest's most unusual stories, and a fascinating reminder that the mountain has always attracted far more than accomplished climbers.

Touching My Father's Soul, by Jamling Tenzing Norgay (2001)

Everest through the eyes of a Sherpa family.

On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay achieved what generations of explorers had failed to accomplish: the first confirmed ascent of Mount Everest. Their triumph made international headlines and transformed both men into legends. But what did reaching the summit mean to Tenzing Norgay, and to the Sherpa communities for whom the mountain had long held profound spiritual significance?

In Touching My Father's Soul, Tenzing's son, Jamling Tenzing Norgay, offers a deeply personal perspective.

More than four decades after his father's historic climb, Jamling joined the 1996 Everest IMAX expedition led by filmmaker David Breashears. The expedition took place during the same climbing season as the deadly storm made famous by Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. Jamling's account moves between his own difficult ascent and the story of his father's achievement, while offering a window into Sherpa traditions, Buddhist beliefs, and the culture of the Himalayan climbing community.

For many Western adventurers, Everest represents an ultimate personal challenge. But for the Sherpa people who guide climbers, establish routes, transport equipment, and sustain the climbing industry, the mountain carries meanings that extend far beyond individual accomplishment. Jamling's story reminds us that Everest's history cannot be told solely through the experiences of the foreign climbers who arrive each spring.

Of all the books in this collection, Touching My Father's Soul may do the most to change how readers think about the mountain itself.

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer (1997)

The modern classic that exposed the dangers of Everest.

On May 10, 1996, journalist Jon Krakauer was high on Mount Everest as part of a commercial expedition led by renowned New Zealand guide Rob Hall. Krakauer had joined the climb on assignment for Outside magazine, intending to report on the growing business of guided Everest expeditions. Instead, he found himself caught in one of the mountain's most devastating disasters.

As climbers struggled to descend from the summit, a violent storm engulfed the mountain. Exhaustion, dwindling oxygen supplies, and deteriorating visibility created a terrifying situation. Eight climbers died on Everest during the May 10–11 disaster, including Hall and fellow expedition leader Scott Fischer. Krakauer survived, but the experience profoundly affected him.

His bestselling account, Into Thin Air, is among the most gripping works of adventure nonfiction ever written. It captures the physical misery of climbing at extreme altitude, the increasingly desperate decisions made during the storm, and the terrible consequences when plans unravel in an environment where even a small mistake can prove fatal.

Yet the book is about more than survival. Krakauer questions the commercialization of Everest, the responsibilities of professional guides, and the motivations of climbers willing to pay substantial sums for a chance to stand on the summit. His version of events was challenged by other survivors, adding another troubling dimension to the story: how do we determine what really happened when witnesses are exhausted, oxygen-deprived, and struggling with trauma?

Nearly thirty years after its publication, Into Thin Air remains one of the defining books about Mount Everest, and one of our favorite adventure reads.

Read our full Travelreads review of Into Thin Air.

Everest, Inc., by Will Cockrell (2024)

How the world's highest mountain became a global business.

The Everest of Mallory and Irvine was a remote and largely unknown wilderness, accessible only to a small number of highly experienced explorers. Today's Everest is something very different. Each climbing season, paying clients arrive in Nepal hoping to reach the summit with the assistance of professional guides, Sherpa climbing teams, specialized equipment, and an increasingly sophisticated expedition infrastructure.

How did this transformation happen?

In Everest, Inc., journalist Will Cockrell traces the rise of commercial mountaineering, beginning with the unconventional entrepreneurs and guides who recognized an opportunity to make Everest accessible to people who would never have qualified for the great national expeditions of the past. The resulting business changed Everest forever.

Cockrell introduces the personalities who helped build the industry, examines the economics of guided climbing, and explores the complex relationship between international adventure tourism and the communities that make these expeditions possible. The book also challenges some familiar assumptions. Commercial climbing has unquestionably introduced new pressures, including overcrowding, environmental concerns, and difficult questions about the risks borne by local workers. But it has also created employment, economic opportunities, and a route to the summit for a much broader range of people.

Cockrell doesn't offer a simple verdict. Instead, he reveals an industry full of contradictions, where extraordinary human achievement and commercial ambition are often inseparable. For anyone curious about what Everest has become, Everest, Inc. is a particularly revealing read.

There and Back: Photographs from the Edge, by Jimmy Chin (2021)

Seeing Everest through the eyes of the filmmaker behind Everest: The Other Side.

Perhaps no contemporary filmmaker has done more to capture the beauty, danger, and psychology of extreme adventure than Jimmy Chin. The celebrated climber, photographer, and co-director of Free Solo has spent decades accompanying some of the world's most accomplished athletes into places where few others would dare to venture.

Long before making Everest: The Other Side, Chin had his own frightening experience on the mountain's North Face. In 2003, he joined snowboarder Stephen Koch on an attempt to climb and descend Everest's direct North Face. The pair planned to climb alpine-style, without supplemental oxygen, fixed ropes, or established camps.

Their expedition ended after an enormous piece of ice broke away above them. The falling debris narrowly missed the climbers, but the force of the collapse threw Chin and their equipment across a glacier riddled with crevasses. Recognizing the danger, they abandoned the attempt. More than two decades later, Chin returned to the same formidable face as a filmmaker, following Jim Morrison's extraordinary ambition to ski the mountain.

Chin's 2021 photography collection, There and Back, offers a fascinating look at the experiences that shaped his career. The book is not exclusively about Everest. Its more than 200 photographs span expeditions around the world, from Himalayan peaks and remote Antarctic landscapes to the sheer granite walls of Yosemite.

But Everest features prominently, including Chin's 2003 snowboarding expedition and his later adventures on the mountain. Alongside the spectacular images are stories of remarkable athletes, difficult decisions, dangerous conditions, and the relationships formed through shared experiences at the limits of human endurance.

For anyone inspired by Everest: The Other Side, There and Back makes a particularly fitting companion. It offers the chance to see these extraordinary places through the eyes of someone who has spent much of his life exploring, photographing, and attempting to understand them.

Why Everest Still Fascinates Us

A century after Mallory and Irvine disappeared into the clouds, Everest continues to inspire extraordinary feats of courage, ambition, and sometimes obsession. The mountain has changed, but its hold on the human imagination remains as powerful as ever.

Each of these six books reveals a different side of Everest, from its fascinating history and remarkable people to the breathtaking beauty and danger of its slopes. Together, they offer something that even the most spectacular photograph cannot: a deeper understanding of the world's highest mountain and the stories that make it unforgettable.

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Written by Duncan JD Smith, author of the Only In Guides

The path that led to my becoming a travel writer began a long time ago. Back in the early 1970s, when I was barely a teenager, three events shaped my adult professional life. First and foremost, my headstrong mother booked a family holiday to Tangier, Morocco at a time when most Brits were happy either to stay at home or else hop across the Channel to France. Secondly, my erudite father introduced me to an obscure book called Clockjacks and Beeboles, which celebrated architectural oddities around the British Isles. And thirdly, my maternal grandfather, a retired banker-cum-local historian, accompanied me into his back garden, where he told me that the stones on his rockery came from the grave of a Roman soldier. To a young boy brought up in the north of England who wasn’t interested in football, these encounters opened up a world of adventurous possibilities that I am still pursuing half a century later.

Around the same time, I opened my own private museum in my parents’ cellar. There was never a holiday or even a day trip when I didn’t return with a pocket full of fossils, seashells and human detritus. Nothing of any monetary value but priceless to me.

Looking back it seems inevitable that when it came to university I chose to study Ancient History and Archaeology. Digging deep into topics as diverse as prehistoric tools, Egyptian mummies and ancient Greeks only tantalised further my imagination. So much so that when I left university it was sobering to discover that it was not so easy to step into Indiana Jones‘ shoes! Fortunately by this stage I had developed a parallel passion for books, partly a result of both my parents having been librarians. So my first job was not as an archaeologist but as a bookseller in my home town of Sheffield.

I can’t say that I had too much interest in fiction in those days but I loved dealing with travel books and maps. I soon came to the attention of a local book distributor, which kickstarted a decade-long career in sales. Exhausting work for sure but it taught me the ins and outs of publishing, which would later prove invaluable. I worked for all manner of travel publishers, from one-man operations producing local interest titles to major concerns including Lonely Planet. I would be lying, however, if I didn’t admit that in the back of my mind I wanted to stop selling other writers’ guidebooks and instead write my own.

My chance came unexpectedly in 1998. I met and fell in love with an Austrian girl, who would later become my wife. I had long relished the idea of one day living abroad, even just for a short while. So it was that in 2003 I shipped out to Vienna ostensibly just for half a year or when my funds ran out. I arrived on a Friday, realised I’d burned my bridges over the weekend, and on the Monday defaulted to what I’d always done when abroad. I took my notebook and camera and set about exploring the city. It doesn’t take long in a city like Vienna to start picking up on the history. Remembering what I’d learned as a boy to search out the curious and the unexpected, I quickly began assembling a list of locations that told the city’s story through the eyes of an outsider. I was drawn by Roman ruins lurking in cellars, Second World War remains unknown to visitors, and specialist museums celebrating the likes of Esperanto, chimney sweeps, and the film The Third Man. By year’s end I had enough material for a guidebook and wandered into a Viennese publisher’s office full of enthusiasm.

I was incredibly fortunate. Had I arrived at a good time in the world of publishing? Was I perceived as something out of the ordinary? Did I have a book idea that could potentially morph into a series? It was probably a combination of all three because within a week I received a contract. The title of the book, however, proved more difficult and I worked through several ideas. It was only when I was reading a section of text I’d written about a remarkably ornate public convenience that I exclaimed out loud “Only in Vienna” and there was my title.

Only in Vienna has subsequently gone into five editions and counting, and in the intervening years it has been joined by a further eighteen titles all under the ‚Only In‘ banner. Each tells the story of a place using its unique locations, hidden corners and unusual objects. As for my target audience, I would describe them as independent cultural travellers, since that is how I would describe myself. Likeminded people who are not afraid of swapping the tour group for an adventure of their own getting under the skin of a place. Since 2010, I have taken over the publishing reign of my books under my own imprint The Urban Explorer. Having control over everything from the chosen destination through writing and photography is something that suits me down to the ground.

I learned early on that for a travel writer to find a measure of success, he or she needs to identify a niche about which they are passionate and to develop their own unique voice. They also need to be able to work long hours on their own. Self-discipline and independence is everything. Only in this way have I survived so long in what is an increasingly competitive and crowded market, one which has only become more so with the inexorable advance of artificial intelligence.

My research trips continue to take me far and wide, from Budapest to Krakow and from Berlin to Seville, around the Mediterranean coast from Marseille to Tangier, and even across the Atlantic to Boston, Massachusetts. All the things I’ve seen and the diverse people I’ve met are a reminder that despite the lowly income, travel writing is for some people the best job in the world. At the time of writing I have a volume on Athens in the pipeline, with a further two volumes in preparation. Despite reaching retirement age I see no reason to stop while ever I can do the work and there are enough readers out there who enjoy my work.

Happy Exploring! For more information about Duncan and his work as an independent travel writer and guidebook author visit www.duncanjdsmith.com and www.onlyinguides.com.

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From the family kitchens of Bologna to the pasta-making streets of Bari and a grandmother's table in Sicily, discover an Italy where food is about much more than what we eat.

As little girls in Italy, sisters Monica and Barbara grew up learning the art of handmade pasta from their grandmother, affectionately known as Nonna Dolce. They learned to knead the dough, roll it into thin sheets, and shape it with their hands. Their grandmother was passing along something more valuable than a recipe: a family tradition that would stay with them for a lifetime. Today, the sisters share those same techniques with travelers visiting Bologna, inviting strangers into a culinary tradition that began in their grandmother's kitchen.

Across Italy, stories like theirs reveal something wonderful about the country's food culture. In family kitchens, neighborhood streets, and around dinner tables, recipes are passed between generations, carrying memories of the people and places that shaped them. And increasingly, travelers have the opportunity to become part of these traditions, learning not just how to prepare a local dish, but something about the lives of the people who make it.

Here are three places where cooking with Italy's grandmothers—or with the families preserving their recipes—offers a particularly memorable way to discover the country.

Bologna: A Grandmother's Legacy, Passed Down with Love

In Emilia-Romagna, food is inseparable from local identity. This is the region of Parmigiano Reggiano, traditional balsamic vinegar, and some of Italy's most beloved pasta dishes. In Bologna, the traditional sfogline are celebrated for their skill in rolling fresh egg pasta into impossibly thin sheets using long wooden rolling pins.

For Monica and Barbara, the art of handmade pasta began with their grandmother, Nonna Dolce. Those childhood lessons became the inspiration for Try And Taste, through which the sisters now welcome visitors to learn the same family techniques. Their private classes use traditional tools, simple ingredients, and the patient process of making pasta entirely by hand.

There's something special about learning a recipe from the people who inherited it. How thin should the dough be? How do you know when it's ready? Some answers are easier to demonstrate than explain, learned through watching someone's hands and trying the movement yourself. For the sisters, teaching these skills is a way of honoring their grandmother. For visitors, it's a chance to understand a little more about the family traditions that make Bologna's food culture so distinctive.

Bari: The Street Where Grandmothers Keep a Neighborhood Tradition Alive

Travel south to Puglia, and the tradition moves from the kitchen into the street. In Bari Vecchia, the city's atmospheric old town, a narrow passage called Strada Arco Basso has become famous as Via delle Orecchiette—the street of little ears.

Here, women sit outside their homes making the small, cup-shaped pasta that is the pride of Puglia. Their hands move with remarkable speed: a piece of dough, a flick of the knife, a twist of the thumb, and another perfectly shaped orecchietta joins the hundreds already drying on wooden tables. Neighbors stop to chat, visitors watch in fascination, and a tradition passed from mothers to daughters continues in full view of the neighborhood.

Unlike Bologna's rich egg pasta, orecchiette traditionally requires just two ingredients: durum-wheat semolina and water. The technique, however, takes years to master. For generations, knowing how to make something nourishing from such humble ingredients has been an important part of family life.

Today, travelers can explore Bari's old town, meet local pasta makers, and even learn to shape orecchiette themselves. But the real appeal is discovering a living tradition that connects neighbors and generations. Here, cooking isn't something hidden away in a professional kitchen. It's woven into the everyday rhythm of the street, where food, family, and community have always belonged together.

Palermo: A Place at Nonna Enza's Table

Just outside Palermo, near the seaside town of Mondello, a Sicilian grandmother named Enza has welcomed travelers into a home kitchen to share traditional recipes and cooking techniques. It's a chance to discover another side of Sicily, an island whose cuisine reflects centuries of Greek, Arab, Norman, and Spanish influences.

In one such experience, guests meet their host, Francesco, who accompanies them to the kitchen and helps translate the grandmother's instructions into English. Working together in a small group, they prepare traditional Sicilian dishes that might include handmade pasta, a local specialty, or a dessert. The setting is informal, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions, practice unfamiliar techniques, and learn about Sicilian food traditions.

After the cooking comes perhaps the best part: gathering around the table on an outdoor terrace, enjoying the food and sharing stories. One visitor who cooked with Enza described her warmth and patience, recalling a meal filled with conversation and laughter. The experience felt less like a conventional cooking class and more like being welcomed into a Sicilian family.

It's a lovely example of how food can bring people together across cultures. Cooking gives strangers something to share, even when they don't speak the same language. A demonstration, a smile, or the offer of another helping can communicate just as much as a conversation.

For travelers exploring Palermo, cooking with a local nonna near Mondello offers a memorable way to encounter Sicilian hospitality. And somewhere between preparing a meal and sitting down together, strangers can begin to feel a little more like friends.

Bringing Italy Home: The Wonderful World of Pasta Grannies

These encounters are part of a much larger story, one that British food writer Vicky Bennison has spent years documenting. Through her popular Pasta Grannies project, Bennison travels across Italy meeting grandmothers, filming them in their kitchens, and preserving recipes they've spent lifetimes perfecting.

Her wonderful cookbook, Pasta Grannies: Comfort Cooking, introduces readers to remarkable home cooks, including 91-year-old Pina in Liguria, who prepares chestnut gnocchi with walnut pesto using ingredients grown around her home, and 99-year-old Marietta in Calabria, whose tagliatelle reflects the seasons and the bounty of her vegetable garden.

With 60 traditional recipes, beautiful photography, and QR codes linking to videos of the women preparing their dishes, the book is as much a collection of personal stories as it is a cookbook. Each recipe offers a glimpse into the regional traditions and everyday lives that make Italian cooking so special.

The Souvenir That Lasts

Perhaps one of the most meaningful things you can bring home from Italy is a recipe with a story attached. The handmade pasta you learned to roll in Bologna, the little ears of dough you shaped in Bari, or the Sicilian meal you prepared alongside a welcoming grandmother. Years later, making that dish in your own kitchen might bring back memories of the people you met and the places you discovered. And that's a pretty wonderful souvenir.

The three cookbooks above link to Bookshop.org, where your purchase helps support independent bookstores. Inspired to try Italian cooking for yourself? Explore hands-on cooking classes across Italy with Cookly, where you can learn local recipes and traditions firsthand. For more inspiration, discover our favorite books about Italy or explore our collection of travel cookbooks from around the world.

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Millions of people visit the Vatican every year. They stand beneath Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, walk through galleries crowded with Roman sculpture and Renaissance paintings, and cross St. Peter’s Square beneath Bernini’s great colonnades.

Almost none of them ever enter the Vatican Library.

Hidden within the Vatican Palace is one of the world’s great collections of human knowledge: ancient manuscripts, early printed books, maps, drawings, coins, photographs and documents gathered across centuries. The modern library dates to the Renaissance, but its collections reach much further back, preserving works from the ancient world, the Middle Ages and cultures far beyond Europe.

It is easy to imagine the Vatican Library as a kind of secret vault. In reality, its purpose is almost the opposite. Its mission is to preserve extraordinarily fragile material while making it available to scholars — and increasingly, through digitization, to the rest of us.

A Renaissance idea

The Vatican had collections of books and documents long before the Renaissance. What changed in the 15th century was the ambition behind them.

Pope Nicholas V, one of the great humanist popes, sought out manuscripts and supported the copying and translation of classical works at a moment when Renaissance scholars were trying to recover the intellectual inheritance of the ancient world. His goal was not simply to build an impressive papal collection, but to create a library that scholars could actually use.

After his death, Pope Sixtus IV gave the idea a permanent institutional form. In 1475 he formally established the Vatican Library and appointed the humanist Bartolomeo Platina as its first librarian. The combination of systematic collecting, professional stewardship and access for scholars made the library an important expression of a distinctly Renaissance idea: knowledge from the past should be actively recovered, organized, preserved and studied. More than five centuries later, that remains essentially its purpose.

What exactly is inside?

One of the best places to begin is with Dante. The Vatican Library owns roughly 40 substantially complete manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, but one stands apart: the Dante Urbinate, created for Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, in the late 15th century. The Library describes it as its most celebrated Dante manuscript, and it is easy to see why. Across 117 full-page illuminations, Dante's journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso unfolds almost like a Renaissance graphic novel, with richly painted scenes accompanying the text.

The manuscript was copied between 1474 and 1478 by Matteo de Contugi. Many of its illustrations were created in Ferrara by Guglielmo Giraldi and his workshop, while the unfinished portions were completed more than a century later. Federico's great library eventually entered the Vatican collections in 1657.

The Dante Urbinate is spectacular, but it is hardly an isolated treasure.

The Codex Vaticanus, produced in the fourth century, is one of the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Greek Bible. It had already entered the Vatican collection by the 15th century, after a history that scholars have traced through Byzantium and Constantinople.

The Vatican Vergil preserves the works of Virgil in one of the oldest surviving illustrated classical manuscripts. Its surviving miniatures offer a rare glimpse of how readers in late antiquity imagined scenes from works such as the Aeneid. The Library considered it important enough to make it the first manuscript in its series of photographic facsimiles, published in 1899.

Other celebrated manuscripts include the Roman Vergil, another exceptionally early manuscript of Virgil; the long illustrated Byzantine Joshua Roll; Petrarch's manuscript of the Canzoniere; and the lavishly illuminated Menologion of Basil II, created in the Byzantine world around the turn of the first millennium. These were among the treasures the Library chose for some of its earliest facsimile editions, an effort that began more than a century ago to make important manuscripts accessible beyond the walls of the Vatican.

The collections extend far beyond famous literary and biblical works. There are manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and many other languages; scientific and medical texts; correspondence and family archives; music; prints and drawings; coins and medals; photographs; and extensive cartographic collections.

The maps are especially fitting in a place like the Vatican. Over centuries they recorded expanding geographical knowledge, changing political boundaries and radically different ideas about the shape of the world. Taken together with the Library's books and manuscripts, they make the collection something much broader than a religious archive: a record of how generations of people tried to describe, preserve and understand the world around them.

A library that still works

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Vatican Library is that it is not a museum. It remains a working research library where qualified scholars come to study manuscripts, rare books and other original material.

Behind the historic rooms is a modern organization with specialists devoted to manuscripts, printed books, coins and medals, conservation, cataloguing, photography, digitization and information technology. Overall responsibility rests with the Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church, while the Prefect of the Vatican Library directs its scholarly and administrative operations.

The staff includes librarians, manuscript specialists, historians, conservators, photographers and technology experts. Their challenge is straightforward to describe but difficult to accomplish: preserve material that may already be hundreds or thousands of years old while still allowing it to be studied.

Preserving a book without hiding it

A medieval manuscript is unique. Every time it is opened, handled or moved, there is some degree of risk, yet keeping it permanently closed would defeat much of the reason for preserving it in the first place.

Digitization has given the Library a way to reconcile those competing goals. Beginning in earnest in the early 2010s, it undertook a major effort to photograph and digitize its manuscript holdings. Each volume has to be assessed, prepared, photographed page by page, checked, catalogued and stored in digital formats intended to remain usable well into the future.

The result is the Digital Vatican Library, where anyone can now explore thousands of digitized manuscripts and other materials, often page by page and in remarkable detail.

Explore the Digital Vatican Library

For Travelreads readers, this may be the closest thing to walking through the Library itself. You can open manuscripts that once would have been available only to a small group of scholars and examine their handwriting, illustrations and margins from anywhere in the world.

Can you visit the Vatican Library?

Usually, no.

The Vatican Library is not part of the standard Vatican Museums route, and ordinary visitors cannot simply buy a ticket and enter its reading rooms. Access is primarily for qualified researchers with a defined scholarly purpose, and particularly rare materials may require additional authorization. The historic spaces are occasionally used for exhibitions, cultural programs and special events, so it is worth checking the Library's exhibition schedule before visiting Rome.

For most travelers, though, the best way to experience the Library is indirectly. Visit the Vatican Museums knowing that beyond the public galleries another institution is still at work: researchers studying manuscripts, conservators repairing fragile volumes, photographers digitizing pages and librarians cataloguing collections accumulated over centuries. Before or after the visit, spend some time in the Digital Vatican Library and look closely at something such as the Dante Urbinate or Codex Vaticanus.

Read more

A few books can take the story further without requiring a degree in manuscript studies.

The Vatican: All the Paintings by Anja Grebe
A lavish visual survey of the Vatican’s artistic collections. It is broader than the Library itself, but it captures the extraordinary concentration of art, history and scholarship that makes the Vatican such a remarkable place.

The Vatican: Secrets and Treasures of the Holy City
A richly illustrated introduction to the Vatican’s history, art and institutions, with a focus on the remarkable places, collections and stories that have accumulated within its walls. A good choice for readers who want a broader sense of the Vatican before visiting Rome.

The Vatican Secret by David Leadbeater
For something lighter, this thriller begins with the theft of an ancient manuscript from the Vatican and turns into an international chase. It is fiction, of course, but it plays directly with the sense of secrecy and hidden history that makes the real Vatican Library so intriguing.

A library built for the future

The Vatican Library's most interesting achievement may be that it has remained remarkably faithful to its Renaissance purpose. It was created to collect important knowledge, preserve it and make it available for study; today, conservation labs, digital photography and online access have simply expanded the ways that mission can be carried out.

Understanding the Library also changes the way we understand the Vatican itself. The Vatican is not only a center of faith, art and ceremony, but also a place that has spent centuries collecting, organizing and preserving ideas from across the world. That tradition helps explain much of what surrounds a visitor in Rome: the manuscripts, maps, architecture, museums and extraordinary concentration of art and scholarship all belong to the same larger story.

The rooms and manuscripts may belong to another age, but the institution is still doing what it was created to do more than 500 years ago: helping preserve the past so that it can continue to shape how we understand the present.

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Fushimi Inari is one of Japan’s oldest Shinto shrines, founded in 711 on the slopes of Inariyama in what is now southern Kyoto. Today, roughly 10,000 vermilion torii gates are scattered along paths across the 233-meter-high mountain, sometimes standing apart and sometimes packed tightly enough to form the orange tunnels that have become one of Japan’s most recognizable sights. To follow the full mountain circuit is a walk of about four kilometers and roughly two hours, passing through gates for much of the way as the route climbs through forest, smaller shrines and sacred sites before circling back down.

The shrine is dedicated to Inari, a kami—roughly, a Shinto god or sacred presence—associated first with rice and harvests and, over time, with prosperity more broadly. A deity who could help crops flourish also made sense to someone hoping a shop, workshop or family business would flourish.

By the early 1600s, Kyoto was a very different place from the imperial capital of centuries earlier. Political power had shifted elsewhere, but the city remained crowded with commerce and craft. Silk was being woven in Nishijin. Merchants traded in the busy central districts. Artisans produced paper, lacquerware, ceramics, clothing and countless other goods, and family businesses could prosper through what they made and sold. In this increasingly commercial world, Inari's association with abundance had an obvious appeal beyond the rice fields.

That is the world in which the torii began to multiply.

Nobody seems to know who purchased the first one, and there is no known moment when anyone decided to create a row of gates. What the shrine can say is that donating torii had become widespread as an offering by the beginning of the Edo period. The practice carried an appealing bit of wordplay: tōru, meaning “to pass through,” could suggest that a prayer had successfully passed through to the deity. Worshippers began dedicating torii, and the offerings accumulated along the paths of the sacred mountain.

It is useful to picture the donors not simply as anonymous worshippers but as people with very practical hopes. A textile merchant might worry about whether orders would continue coming. A shopkeeper might want a new business to succeed. A sake brewer, craftsman or trading family might have enjoyed a prosperous year and wanted that good fortune to continue.

And a torii was a wonderfully tangible kind of offering. The donor could pay for an actual wooden gate to be made and placed on the mountain, with the person's, family's or company's name inscribed on it. The black lettering seen on the backs of the gates today therefore changes the way they look once you know what it means. What initially appears to be one enormous orange structure is actually thousands of individual objects, paid for by different people at different moments.

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The gates themselves were made by craftsmen from timber, traditionally cedar, shaped into posts and crosspieces and finished in the vivid vermilion associated with Inari shrines. Larger donations could mean larger gates. The pieces then had to reach their position on Inariyama and be erected there—a more substantial undertaking for a large torii farther up the mountain than the finished gate suggests.

This happened one donation at a time. There was no master plan calling for 10,000 gates, and the famous tunnels were not conceived as a single work of architecture. There must have been a time when a visitor encountered an occasional donated torii on the mountain, then more of them, then clusters and rows. As generations continued to give, the spaces between them filled in and at some point those separate offerings began to create corridors.

And it still isn't finished.

Individuals and companies can donate a full-sized torii at Fushimi Inari today. It is not merely a symbolic contribution to the shrine: the shrine still accepts applications for actual gates to be erected. A prospective donor contacts the shrine office's management section, and applications are also handled through several of the traditional teahouses located among the sacred sites on the mountain.

The current prices make the tradition surprisingly concrete. The smallest listed full-sized gate, a No. 5 torii, begins at ¥300,000. Larger gates rise through ¥567,000, ¥702,000 and ¥1 million, with a No. 10 gate beginning at ¥1.89 million. A person or business can therefore make essentially the same decision that generations of worshippers made before them: choose to spend real money on a gate, have it dedicated in their name, and add another physical piece to Inariyama.

The surrounding world has changed almost beyond recognition since Kyoto's Edo-period merchants first embraced the practice. Businesses became corporations, Japan industrialized, and Fushimi Inari itself became an international attraction photographed by millions of visitors. Yet new torii continue to appear among the old ones.

That makes Fushimi Inari something slightly different from the ancient monument it appears to be in photographs. The shrine is ancient, but the landscape of gates has never really been finished. It grew out of thousands of separate decisions, made over centuries, and someone can still make the next one today.

For readers who want to go deeper into the world behind Fushimi Inari, Karen A. Smyers’s The Fox and the Jewel is an unusually good companion. Drawing on extensive research into Inari worship, the book explores how people understand Inari, the role of foxes, the meaning of sacred places, and the very personal ways worshippers approach prosperity, protection, and belief. It adds useful context to the mountain without reducing it to a set of rituals or symbols. You can find The Fox and the Jewel in the Travelreads store on Bookshop.org. Travelreads partners with Bookshop.org because it offers a simple way to recommend books while supporting independent bookstores.

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On a Saturday morning at Oodi, Helsinki’s enormous central library, the name itself offers a clue to the building’s ambition. Oodi means “ode” in Finnish, and the library was conceived as exactly that: a celebration of reading, creativity, and public life.

The idea becomes especially clear on the top floor, where children scatter across the open space. Some head for the books. Others climb onto broad steps, settle into cushions, join a game, or follow a parent toward one of the library’s play spaces. A toddler may spend more time crawling than reading. An older child can disappear with a book while the rest of the family stays nearby.

This is exactly how Oodi is meant to work. Its children’s area is not a quiet room where young visitors are expected to sit still. Reading, playing, talking, exploring, and simply spending time together all belong in the same space. For Finnish children, the library is not only somewhere to go for books. It is somewhere to go.

That makes Oodi’s origin story especially fitting. The library opened in 2018 as Finland marked a century of independence and was conceived as a gift to the Finnish people. There is something wonderfully revealing about that choice. To commemorate a national milestone, Finland created a place people could enter every day—a place for reading, making, meeting, playing, and simply spending time together.

Oodi is also worth seeking out simply as a place to visit. Designed by Helsinki-based ALA Architects, the building combines a sweeping wooden façade with glass and steel, and its three floors have distinctly different personalities. The airy upper level, often called “Book Heaven,” holds the main collection and children’s area beneath a rolling white ceiling and walls of glass. The building is large and ambitious, but the effect is surprisingly warm. It feels less like a monument to books than a place that invites you to pick one up, look around, and stay awhile.

Finland has spent years at the top of the World Happiness Report. We have no idea whether places like Oodi have anything to do with that, but we like to think they might. There is something hopeful about a country choosing to make places like this part of everyday life—beautiful, welcoming spaces where people can read, gather, play, and simply spend time together.

Oodi gives children a physical place for curiosity—to browse, play, wander, and discover something they did not arrive looking for. But to understand another side of Finnish childhood, it helps to leave the library behind and enter a much stranger place.

Welcome to Moominvalley

Created by Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson, Moominvalley is filled with forests and islands, sudden storms and long winters, mysterious visitors and unexpected journeys. Its inhabitants wander off, get lost, become frightened, make friends, and eventually find their way home. The stories are whimsical, but they are never merely cute. They give children something Oodi does too: the freedom to explore a world without knowing exactly what they will find.

That connection makes the Moomins more than a charming Finnish souvenir. Oodi creates space for curiosity with architecture. Jansson created it with stories. The Moomins first appeared in the 1940s and have since become one of Finland’s most recognizable cultural creations. Their round white figures now appear on mugs, clothing, toys, and shops throughout the country, which can make it easy to underestimate the books themselves.

Reading Moominvalley

For families who want to spend more time in that world, Tove Jansson’s original Moomin stories are available in several collected editions, including the Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip series..

For families traveling beyond Helsinki, the Moomin trail can continue. Tampere is home to the world’s only Moomin Museum, built around Jansson’s original illustrations and artwork, while Finland’s coast and archipelago offer a chance to encounter some of the landscapes that fed her imagination.

That may be the most interesting connection between Oodi and Moominvalley. Neither tells children exactly where curiosity should lead. Both simply give it somewhere to go.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, whose mission is to support independent bookstores. Purchases made through these links may earn Travelreads a small commission at no additional cost to readers.

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For most of human history, cities could only rise so high.

Stone and brick were heavy. The taller a building became, the thicker its walls needed to be. Upper floors were difficult to reach, fire was a constant risk, and wind became a greater problem with every additional story. Long before skyscrapers, cathedrals offered their own version of architectural wonder. Their towers and spires rose above medieval cities as symbols of faith, wealth, and human ambition, proving that height itself could inspire awe.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, several breakthroughs arrived at roughly the same time. Safer elevators made upper floors practical. Iron and steel frames allowed buildings to carry their weight internally rather than through massive exterior walls. Better foundations, fireproofing, and construction methods pushed the limits higher.

The modern skyscraper was born. In little more than a century, humanity went from experimenting with ten-story buildings to constructing a tower more than half a mile into the sky.

Chicago Learns to Build Up

The story begins in a city rebuilding itself.

After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Chicago entered a period of extraordinary growth. Downtown land became increasingly valuable, businesses needed more space, and architects began experimenting with new ways to build upward.

One of the most important examples was the Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885. At ten stories and 138 feet, it would barely register on a modern skyline. Its importance was structural. Designed by William Le Baron Jenney, it used a metal framework to carry much of the building’s weight, reducing the need for the enormous masonry walls used in earlier tall buildings. It is often called the world’s first skyscraper, although historians still debate which building truly deserves that title.

Like many inventions, the skyscraper did not appear in a single moment. Engineers in several cities were experimenting with elevators, iron, steel, fireproofing, and new structural systems at the same time. Still, Chicago became one of the great laboratories for the new form. Jenney, Daniel Burnham, John Root, Louis Sullivan, and others explored not only how tall buildings should stand, but what they should look like.

A city no longer had to grow only outward. It could grow upward.

New York Races Toward the Sky

Once tall buildings became possible, height quickly became something more than a practical solution. It became competition. By the early twentieth century, New York had embraced the skyscraper with extraordinary enthusiasm. Manhattan’s expensive land made building upward attractive, but developers and corporations also recognized the symbolic power of a tower that could dominate the skyline.

The Woolworth Building reached 792 feet in 1913. By the late 1920s, the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street were competing for the title of world’s tallest. Chrysler architect William Van Alen famously concealed a steel spire inside the upper floors before raising it into place, taking the building to 1,046 feet. Its reign was brief. The Empire State Building opened in 1931 at 1,250 feet. The upward push continued after World War II, and when the original World Trade Center’s North Tower was completed in the early 1970s, its roof reached 1,368 feet.

In less than a century, the skyscraper had gone from an experiment to one of the defining forms of the modern city.

A New Kind of Skyline

By then, the skyscraper no longer belonged to Chicago and New York.

Cities around the world began pushing the form in new directions. Taipei 101 reached 1,667 feet in 2004 and showed how advanced engineering could respond to the challenges of earthquakes and typhoons. Shanghai Tower rose to 2,073 feet in 2015, its twisting form helping reduce wind loads while signaling China’s arrival in the supertall era. Merdeka 118, completed in Kuala Lumpur in 2023, climbed even higher to 2,227 feet, becoming the second-tallest building in the world.

Half a Mile Into the Sky

The Burj Khalifa rises 2,717 feet above Dubai. It remains the tallest of them all, more than twice the height of the Empire State Building and dramatically taller than the earliest skyscrapers that helped begin the story. Remarkably, it was not always supposed to be that tall. An earlier design was already ambitious, but as the project evolved, the tower kept growing. The goal was not merely to surpass an existing record, but to create something so far beyond it that the world would have no choice but to notice.

Building at that scale required solutions the earliest skyscraper designers could scarcely have imagined. The Burj Khalifa has three wings arranged around a central core, and the building repeatedly steps inward as it rises. Those setbacks create its distinctive silhouette while also helping disrupt the wind forces acting on the tower.

The building also helps explain Dubai itself. Oil helped fuel Dubai’s early growth, but the emirate never had the enormous reserves of neighboring Abu Dhabi. Its rulers instead pushed aggressively into trade, aviation, tourism, finance, and real estate, using major infrastructure and headline-making development to attract people and investment from around the world. That strategy helped turn Dubai from a regional commercial hub into a global destination. Airports, resorts, shopping, entertainment, and ambitious architecture all became part of the appeal, with the skyline itself serving as an advertisement for the city’s scale and confidence.

The Burj Khalifa was the ultimate expression of that ambition. Its height was never simply about breaking a record. Dubai was building an economy around the idea that people and capital could be persuaded to come there, and creating places the world could not ignore became part of the strategy.

Nothing was harder to ignore than a building more than half a mile high.

Looking Up

It is easy to take skyscrapers for granted. They have become such familiar parts of modern cities that travelers rarely stop to consider either the extraordinary engineering behind them or the remarkable amount of trust involved in stepping inside one and being carried hundreds of feet into the air.

And yet their scale can still be startling. Stand at the base of one and look straight up, and the building seems to disappear into the sky. In Chicago, New York, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and other great vertical cities, skyscrapers do more than shape the skyline. They become part of the experience of being there: the canyon-like streets, the reflections in glass, the views from rivers and observation decks, and the instinct to tilt your head back and wonder how anyone built something so high.

That may be why skyscrapers still have the power to stop people on a sidewalk and make them look upward.

Reading the Skyscraper

For those interested in the stories, engineering, and ambition behind these remarkable buildings:

• Higher by Neal Bascomb — the dramatic race to build the world’s tallest skyscraper.

• Skyscrapers by Judith Dupré — an illustrated survey of landmark towers and their stories.

• The Heights by Kate Ascher — a visual look inside how skyscrapers are built and how they work.

• Dubai Wonder by Myrna Ayad — a beautifully visual portrait of Dubai and the scale, design, and ambition that define the modern city.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, where you’ll find many of the books featured here while helping support independent bookstores.

One of the best parts of travel is stumbling across a souvenir that instantly feels like the one. At Keibunsha in Kyoto, ours turned out to be a tiny set of brass bookmarks.

Keibunsha is a charming independent bookstore in Kyoto’s Ichijoji neighborhood, but part of its appeal is everything happening around the books. The store regularly brings in work from artists, designers, and craftspeople, with a gallery and shelves filled with small-batch objects, paper goods, ceramics, prints, and Keibunsha’s own collaborations. You never quite know what you are going to find.

What caught our eye was the phrase printed right across the package:

READING IS TRAVELING.

It is hard to imagine a better phrase for Travelreads.

The bookmarks are a neat collaboration between Keibunsha and Traveler’s Factory, the Japanese company behind the Traveler’s Notebook. The brass clips themselves are simple and clever, each topped with the outline of an open book.

Small, useful, slightly quirky, and very easy to bring home.

Reading is traveling. We couldn’t have put it better.

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Tucked beside The Mark Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side is a bookstore that is remarkably easy to miss. The Assouline shop on East 77th Street is tiny—more jewel box than sprawling bookstore—but nearly every bit of available space seems devoted to making somewhere else look irresistible.

The shelves are filled with oversized books in vivid colors: Capri, Marrakech, Sicily, Ibiza, Japan, Lake Como, Mykonos, the Amalfi Coast. Pick one up and there is another destination directly behind it. The effect is less like browsing a traditional travel section than standing in front of a wall of possibilities. For a store with such a small footprint, it manages to contain a very large world.

It also presents a familiar dilemma.

Many of Assouline’s best-known travel books cost around $100 or more, which can feel like a lot for a book. Especially a book about a place that can already be explored endlessly online. There are thousands of photographs of Capri, histories of Sicily, videos from Marrakech, maps of Tokyo and restaurant recommendations for Paris available within seconds. And yet people still pick these books up.

Part of the reason may be that they are doing more than one job. A book like this can be a celebration of a place, a souvenir of curiosity about that place, and a beautiful addition to a home or office. That last part is worth admitting. Assouline books are designed to be seen.

Assouline and the Art of the Beautiful Book

Prosper and Martine Assouline founded the company in Paris in 1994, and over the following three decades the name grew into something unusual: part publishing house, part design company, part luxury brand. Its catalog now stretches across travel, art, fashion, architecture, design, food and culture, alongside bookstands, candles, fragrances and decorative pieces.

Even within the books, there is a hierarchy. The colorful volumes most people associate with Assouline belong largely to its Classics Collection. Many of the familiar destination titles—Capri Dolce Vita, Marrakech Flair, Greek Islands, Sicily Honor, Mykonos Muse and St. Moritz Chic among them—sell for around $100, with some titles priced a little higher.

There are also specialty collections. Wine & Travel explores wine regions through landscape, culture and vineyards. The Hospitality Collection focuses on celebrated hotels and resorts. Larger collector-oriented books move into the several-hundred-dollar range. Then there is the Ultimate Collection. These editions can cost well over $1,000 and are hand-bound and presented in elaborate cases. At that point, the line between book, collectible and decoration becomes very thin indeed.

That may sound excessive. It is certainly a long way from buying a paperback for the flight home. But it also makes clear what Assouline is trying to do. The company does not treat books simply as containers for text. It creates books meant to be read, admired and lived with. Travel fits that idea particularly well.

Assouline’s destination books are not conventional guidebooks. Rather than focusing on practical details, they capture the character of a place through photography, architecture, food, landscape, history and style. The view is polished and selective—real destinations are inevitably messier—but travel often begins with just that kind of spark.

The $100 Question

The price still matters. A hundred dollars can feel surprisingly hard to spend on a book, even when spending the same amount on something decorative for the house somehow feels easier. A framed photograph, a print, a lamp or a piece of pottery does not have to justify itself by how much information it contains. Books often do.

That is part of what makes Assouline interesting. The value is not only in the text or even the photographs, but in the physical experience of the book itself: the weight, the scale, the paper, the color and the way the images have been chosen and arranged.

Google can produce millions of pictures of Sicily. A book has to decide which ones belong together.

There is also no point pretending the decorative element does not matter. These are books meant to sit on coffee tables and office shelves. People notice them. They add something to a room. They can also start conversations. That does not make them less like books. It simply gives them another life once they are closed.

A Souvenir of Curiosity

We usually think of a souvenir as something brought home after a journey, but a travel book can be something broader: a souvenir of curiosity. It keeps a place present in our lives, whether through memories, fascination, or simply the possibility of seeing it someday. Because the book remains visible, that curiosity can linger. Someone notices it, a conversation begins, and a place that may have been little more than an idea suddenly feels a little closer.

None of that requires owning an Assouline book, of course. A novel, an old guidebook, a postcard, a photograph or even a map pinned to the wall can keep a place alive in much the same way. Assouline gives that idea a particularly beautiful form.

Explore more of Assouline’s travel collection through the Assouline Store on Amazon, or visit our Travelreads guide to Assouline travel books for more about the collections, standout titles, and the places they celebrate.

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Travelers know that museums can tell us something about a country. So can its stores.

In Tokyo, shopping is not simply something to do between temples, museums, and meals. It can be another way of understanding the city itself: what people value, how much attention they give to quality and presentation, and how much pleasure they take in choosing objects that are useful, well designed, and made with care.

Few places make that case better than Itoya.

The legendary stationery store has occupied a place in Tokyo’s Ginza district for more than a century. Its main building rises floor after floor above one of the city’s great shopping streets, marked outside by an enormous red paper clip. For stationery lovers, designers, artists, journal keepers, and anyone who appreciates a beautifully made object, Itoya has become something close to a pilgrimage. It is easy to understand why once you step inside.

Twelve Floors of Possibility

Calling Itoya a stationery store does not quite prepare you for the scale of it.

There are pens, of course, but not simply a rack of pens. There are seemingly endless variations: different points, inks, colors, weights, materials, and purposes. Notebooks come in an astonishing range of sizes, bindings, paper styles, and colors. Paper itself becomes something to consider carefully rather than something purchased by the ream. Envelopes, cards, folders, desk tools, writing accessories, and wrapping materials are treated with the same attention.

And everywhere there are choices. Not six colors when thirty might be possible. Not one notebook when there are dozens of dimensions. Not a single version of an object when differences in texture, shape, thickness, material, or function might matter.

The effect can be almost overwhelming, but it is also strangely delightful. Itoya takes things most of us regard as mundane and asks us to look at them more closely. A pen is not just something that writes. A notebook is not simply somewhere to put words. Paper can feel different beneath your hand. A particular shade of ink can change the pleasure of writing. An envelope can make receiving a letter feel special before it is even opened.

The Beauty of the Everyday

This attention to detail extends well beyond stationery.

One of the pleasures of traveling through Japan is repeatedly encountering ordinary things that have been given extraordinary thought. The bowl holding breakfast. The wrapping around a purchase. The knife used by a chef. The ceramic cup holding tea. The box around a confection. The cloth covering a gift. The tray beneath a cup of coffee. Function and beauty do not have to be opposing ideas.

That sensibility is especially visible at Itoya because stationery is so inherently ordinary. Most of us use pens, paper, notebooks, calendars, clips, and folders without giving them much thought at all. Itoya gives them an entire building.

That does not mean every object is precious or handmade. Much of what fills the shelves is contemporary, practical, colorful, and designed for everyday use. What is striking is the sheer degree of consideration behind it: the variations, the specialization, the quality of materials, and the belief that people might actually care about the difference.

Craftsmanship in Japan is often associated with the obviously exceptional: handmade ceramics, lacquerware, textiles, woodwork, or the blades produced by specialist knife makers. But perhaps the more revealing version is found in the everyday object that never needed to be special in the first place.

That is where Itoya becomes more than a remarkable store.

Shopping as a Way of Seeing Tokyo

Travel has an odd hierarchy. Visiting a museum counts as cultural exploration. Walking through a historic temple counts as cultural exploration. Spending an hour in a store is usually described simply as shopping. In Tokyo, shopping is not a diversion from seeing the city. It is part of seeing it.

Spend time in the food halls beneath Mitsukoshi or Isetan, where fruit, sweets, bento boxes, tea, and beautifully wrapped gifts are displayed with almost theatrical precision. Walk through Kappabashi and see entire shops devoted to knives, bowls, restaurant tools, or the astonishingly realistic plastic food displayed outside restaurants. Browse ceramics in a small neighborhood shop, fabrics in Nippori, electronics in Akihabara, or the carefully edited household goods at Muji. Even a convenience store can reveal something about Japanese expectations around efficiency, packaging, seasonal products, and attention to detail.

Stores reveal something that museums sometimes cannot. Museums often show us the things a society has decided are worth preserving. Stores show us the things people believe are worth making, buying, and living with now.

Itoya has survived in Ginza since 1904, even as the world around it has become increasingly digital. That alone is intriguing. Tokyo is one of the most technologically sophisticated cities on earth, yet here is a multi-story destination devoted to paper, pens, notebooks, correspondence, and the physical pleasure of writing.

Technology can make life faster. Itoya reminds us that there can still be pleasure in slowing down long enough to choose exactly the right pen, the right paper, or the right shade of blue.

Read More: Japanese Design, Craftsmanship & the Beauty of Everyday Things

The Perfection of the Paper Clip by James Ward
A playful celebration of stationery and the ingenious design hiding inside familiar desk objects, from pens and pencils to paper clips and highlighters.

The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi
A classic exploration of the Japanese appreciation for useful, beautifully made objects and the craftspeople who create them.

WA: The Essence of Japanese Design by Rossella Menegazzo and Stefania Piotti
A visual exploration of Japanese design through hundreds of objects, with particular attention to materials, simplicity, functionality, and craftsmanship. The word wa can suggest harmony as well as a distinctly Japanese sensibility, making it an especially fitting lens for the balance, refinement, and attention to detail found throughout Itoya.

How to Wrap Five Eggs by Hideyuki Oka
A fascinating study of traditional Japanese packaging that shows just how much imagination, beauty, and care can be invested in presenting even the simplest everyday object.

Travelreads partners with Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores. When readers purchase through links on this page, Travelreads may earn a small commission while helping support independent booksellers.

Continue exploring with the Travelreads bookshelf for Japan, where we recommend books that reveal more of the country's history, culture, food, landscapes, traditions, and distinctive sense of place.

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There are few cities in the world that have had to overcome a reputation as powerful as Medellín's.

For many Americans, the city's name still brings to mind Pablo Escobar, cartel violence, and the headlines of the 1980s and 1990s. Television dramas have reinforced that image, leaving many travelers with the impression that Medellín's story begins and ends with one of history's most notorious criminals.

Spend even a few days there, however, and a very different city begins to emerge. Visitors discover tree-lined neighborhoods filled with cafés and restaurants, public plazas where families gather late into the evening, striking public art, efficient public transportation, and a creative energy that has made Medellín one of South America's most compelling urban destinations. The contrast is impossible to ignore.

Medellín's past remains an important part of its story, but it is not the city travelers experience today. Its transformation offers a window into the real Medellín—one defined less by the headlines of the past than by the people and communities that have shaped its present.

A City Shaped by Its Landscape

Medellín sits in Colombia's Aburrá Valley, surrounded by the green mountains of the Antioquia region. At nearly 5,000 feet above sea level, its famously mild climate has earned it the nickname "The City of Eternal Spring."

Its geography has always shaped daily life. The city spreads across the valley floor before climbing steep hillsides on every side, creating spectacular views but, for many years, also creating physical divisions between neighborhoods. Understanding that landscape is the first step toward understanding how Medellín rewrote its story.

Connecting a City

The easiest place to understand Medellín's transformation is aboard the Metro. Unlike many public transportation systems, Medellín's Metro has become a source of civic pride. Stations are clean, trains are remarkably well maintained, and locals often speak of the system as something that belongs to everyone. But the city's most important innovation hangs above the valley.

When Medellín opened the Metrocable in 2004, it wasn't built as a tourist attraction. It became the world's first aerial cable car fully integrated into a city's public transit system. Using the same fare as the Metro, the gondolas connected steep hillside neighborhoods that had long been isolated from jobs, schools, and services. Commutes that once took well over an hour were dramatically shortened, making opportunities across the city far more accessible.

Visitors often board the Metrocable for the sweeping views across the valley. The people standing beside them are simply riding home from work. That simple contrast reveals far more about Medellín than any observation deck ever could.

Investing in Neighborhoods

Transportation was only one part of the story.

During his term as mayor from 2004 to 2007, Sergio Fajardo championed a simple but ambitious philosophy: “Our most beautiful buildings must be in our poorest neighborhoods.” His administration made education central to Medellín’s transformation, building library parks, schools, parks, and other public spaces in communities that had long been overlooked.

The goal was not simply to create attractive architecture. These projects were intended to bring education, opportunity, and a renewed sense of civic pride into neighborhoods that had received too little public investment.

For book lovers, the symbolism is hard to miss. The libraries were not created as attractions. They were built for the people who lived nearby, and visitors now have the opportunity to see how prominently books and learning figured in Medellín’s effort to build a different kind of city.

A Neighborhood Tells Its Own Story

Few places better illustrate Medellín's transformation than Comuna 13.

Once associated with violence, it has become one of the city's most visited neighborhoods. Today, visitors arrive to admire colorful murals, ride a series of outdoor escalators built to make everyday life easier on the steep hillside, listen to musicians performing in public squares, and join walking tours led by local residents.

The murals are beautiful. More importantly, they tell stories. Many of the guides grew up in the neighborhood and now share its history from a deeply personal perspective. Rather than allowing outsiders to define Comuna 13 solely by its past, residents have reclaimed the narrative themselves. The result is neither a celebration nor an attempt to erase difficult history, but a fuller understanding of how the community has changed.

The Medellín Travelers Discover Today

Today, Medellín is one of South America's most rewarding cities to explore.

Mornings begin in neighborhood cafés. Afternoons might include a ride on the Metrocable, a visit to Plaza Botero, or an afternoon wandering the restaurants, bookstores, and boutiques of El Poblado or the more residential streets of Laureles. Many travelers venture farther into Antioquia to visit colorful Guatapé or nearby coffee farms before returning to the city in the evening.

An increasing number of remote workers now choose to spend months in Medellín, drawn by its climate, café culture, creative atmosphere, and quality of life. That popularity has also brought new conversations about housing, tourism, and preserving neighborhood character—reminders that every successful city must continue balancing growth with the needs of the people who call it home.

For visitors, however, perhaps the most remarkable part of Medellín is not any single attraction. It is realizing that nearly everything they experience—the Metro, the Metrocable, the libraries, the public art, and even the atmosphere of the city's neighborhoods—reflects decades of deliberate investment in making Medellín a better place to live. That is the story travelers encounter today.

The importance of books and libraries in Medellín's transformation has now received international recognition. UNESCO has named Medellín its World Book Capital for 2027, celebrating the city's commitment to reading, education, and cultural inclusion. For a city that has worked so hard to rewrite its story, it's a particularly meaningful honor.

Reading Medellín & Columbia

To better understand Medellín's remarkable transformation, it helps to explore both the city's own history and the wider stories of Colombia. These four books offer different perspectives on the country's troubled past, rich culture, and extraordinary literary traditions.

Alonso Salazar's Born to Die in Medellín offers a direct look at the city during its darkest years. Through interviews with young people caught in the violence, Salazar tells a deeply human story that makes Medellín's later transformation all the more remarkable.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Sound of Things Falling broadens the perspective to Colombia as a whole. Rather than focusing on Pablo Escobar himself, the novel explores the emotional weight that the country's years of violence placed on ordinary lives, helping readers understand the broader history that shaped Medellín.

One of the great classics of Colombian literature, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez follows generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo. Although inspired by Colombia's Caribbean region rather than Medellín, García Márquez's masterpiece offers readers an unforgettable introduction to the country's history, imagination, and storytelling traditions.

Finally, Mariana Velásquez's Colombiana introduces readers to another side of the country. Filled with recipes, photography, family traditions, and stories, it celebrates the warmth, creativity, and everyday culture that visitors discover throughout Colombia.

Together, these books reveal a city—and a country—that is far richer than the story many travelers think they already know.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, an online bookstore that supports independent bookstores across the country. When readers purchase an eligible book through the Travelreads Bookshop.org store, Travelreads may earn a small commission at no additional cost to the buyer, while a portion of the sale also helps support independent booksellers.

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Hay-on-Wye is a small market town on the Welsh side of the border with England, surrounded by the green hills and farmland of the Wye Valley. Its streets are lined with stone buildings and painted shopfronts, the restored Hay Castle rises near the center, and the River Wye curves quietly past the edge of town. It would be an appealing place even without its unusual claim to fame.

But Hay is known around the world for one thing: books.

More than twenty independent bookshops are packed into a town small enough to explore on foot. They occupy former commercial buildings, narrow storefronts, old chapels, and rooms filled from floor to ceiling with new, secondhand, and antiquarian titles. Some shops are large enough to occupy several floors. Others specialize in a single subject or resemble private collections that have gradually opened to the public.

Hay-on-Wye is not simply a pleasant town that happens to have several good bookstores. Books became the idea around which the town rebuilt its identity.

The Man Who Saw a Future in Books

That transformation began with Richard Booth, a local bookseller whose ambitions extended far beyond opening a single shop. In the early 1960s, Booth began buying large collections of secondhand books and filling vacant buildings around Hay with them. He believed that a struggling market town could turn itself into an international destination by concentrating on something overlooked and undervalued: used books.

His idea helped transform Hay into what is widely described as the world's first book town. The town's literary identity ultimately became larger than Booth himself. New booksellers arrived, each developing its own specialty, and Hay became known not for one remarkable bookstore, but for an entire town devoted to books.

Exploring the Town of Books

Richard Booth's Bookshop remains one of Hay's essential stops. Its landmark building on Lion Street contains three floors of new, secondhand, and antiquarian books, organized into departments overseen by specialist booksellers. The scale gives it the feel of a library, but the pleasure comes from the unpredictability of the shelves: a familiar title beside something obscure, a modern edition beside a much older copy, or an entire section devoted to a subject a visitor had not intended to explore.

Hay Cinema Bookshop offers a very different experience. Housed in a former cinema, it contains an enormous collection of secondhand and antiquarian books spread through a large, open interior. Addyman Books is known for its distinctive rooms and carefully curated collections, while Murder and Mayhem specializes in crime fiction, detective stories, and mysteries. Other shops focus on poetry, children's books, maps, natural history, music, art, and local history.

For Travelreads readers, the travel shelves are naturally worth seeking out. Broad Street Book Centre has long carried books on travel, transport, railways, and exploration, while the larger shops maintain extensive collections of travel writing and guidebooks. Rather than searching for one definitive travel bookstore, visitors quickly discover that Hay functions almost like a town-sized bookstore, with each shop contributing another department.

The bookshops are close enough together that very little planning is required. A visitor can begin on Lion Street, continue through the center of town, stop at the castle and market square, and simply wander into whichever shop looks most interesting. Hay rewards curiosity more than a rigid itinerary.

Hay Castle and the Honesty Bookshelves

Hay Castle gives the town a visual center as well as another connection to its literary identity. The site combines a medieval keep, a seventeenth-century mansion, and new cultural spaces created during a major restoration. After centuries of private ownership, the castle reopened fully to the public in 2022 and now hosts exhibitions, performances, workshops, and community events.

Outside the castle, the famous honesty bookshelves have become one of Hay's most recognizable sights. Books line open-air shelves built into the castle walls, and visitors simply leave payment in an honesty box. It is a charming tradition that somehow feels perfectly suited to a town built around trust, browsing, and the simple pleasure of discovering another book.

The castle also reminds visitors that Hay is more than a collection of bookstores. The weekly market, cafés, pubs, galleries, and independent shops give it the character of a living market town rather than a literary attraction created solely for tourists. Its Welsh name, Y Gelli, appears alongside the English one, reflecting its position on the border between two countries and cultures.

Beyond the Bookshops

Hay sits just north of Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, still widely known in English as the Brecon Beacons. The surrounding countryside makes it easy to combine a bookstore weekend with walking, cycling, or time along the River Wye. The long-distance Offa's Dyke Path passes nearby, and the river itself is popular for canoeing and kayaking.

This setting is part of Hay's appeal. Although it feels removed from Britain's major cities, it is easy to explore on foot and compact enough that visitors can spend a relaxed day moving between bookshops, cafés, the castle, and the riverside. Many people come for the books and end up appreciating the town itself.

The Hay Festival

Every spring, Hay-on-Wye's literary reputation expands dramatically during the Hay Festival. Founded in 1988, it has grown into one of the world's most respected celebrations of books and ideas, bringing together novelists, historians, journalists, scientists, musicians, and public thinkers for more than a week of conversations and events. The main festival site sits just outside the town center, making it easy to move between scheduled talks and Hay's permanent bookshops.

The next Hay Festival Hay-on-Wye will take place from May 27 through June 6, 2027, marking the festival's 40th anniversary.

Festival week offers the fullest expression of Hay's international literary identity, but it also brings much larger crowds and accommodations often book well in advance. Travelers interested primarily in browsing the bookstores may prefer another time of year, when the streets are quieter and booksellers have more time to recommend an unexpected discovery.

A Literary Pilgrimage

Calling Hay-on-Wye a literary pilgrimage may sound ambitious for a town of only about 1,500 residents, but it captures why readers continue to make the journey.

There are easier and faster ways to buy almost any book. Hay offers something different: the opportunity to spend a day wandering between independent bookstores, browsing shelves without a particular destination, and enjoying a place where books are woven into everyday life.

Visitors may arrive with a shopping list, but Hay is best experienced with room for detours. The most memorable purchase is often not the book someone intended to find, but the one discovered in an unfamiliar shop along the way.

For anyone traveling through Wales or the English border country, Hay-on-Wye is one of Britain's most distinctive small-town destinations.

Reading Hay-on-Wye

No single book tells the story of Hay-on-Wye, but these titles capture the pleasures of bookselling, browsing, and literary travel.

• My Kingdom of Books by Richard Booth — Booth's own account of the vision that helped transform Hay-on-Wye into the world's first book town.

• The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell — A witty and insightful memoir of life in Wigtown, Scotland, another celebrated book town.

• 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff — A timeless correspondence celebrating the relationship between readers and booksellers.

• The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald — A classic novel about opening an independent bookstore in a small English town.

The links above take you to Bookshop.org, our preferred bookselling partner. Every purchase supports independent bookstores, and we're proud to partner with an organization that shares our belief in the enduring value of books and local bookshops.

Continue exploring Britain's literary landscapes with our United Kingdom bookshelf, featuring books that bring the country's history, culture, and remarkable places to life.

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For many travelers, Appalachia begins with a trail.

Perhaps it's the Appalachian Trail, winding more than 2,000 miles through forests and over mountain ridges. Or maybe it's a drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a weekend in Asheville, a visit to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, or simply a road that disappears into the hills.

People come for the scenery. They leave talking about something else. Again and again, visitors remember the music drifting from a local venue, the family-run diner, the craft studio tucked into a mountain town, the conversation with someone proud to call these mountains home. The landscapes are spectacular, but it is often the people—and their connection to this place—that linger long after the trip ends.

The best books about Appalachia help explain why.

Where Is Appalachia?

Appalachia stretches from southern New York to northern Mississippi, crossing parts of thirteen states and encompassing hundreds of communities. It isn't a single destination, nor does it fit neatly into the South, the Midwest, or the Northeast. Like any large region, it contains remarkable diversity. What many visitors discover, however, are shared threads running through the places they explore: traditions of music and storytelling, deep ties to family and community, remarkable craftsmanship, and an enduring relationship with the mountains themselves.

No single article—or book—can define Appalachia. These stories don't try to. Instead, they offer four different windows into a region whose greatest appeal extends far beyond its beautiful scenery. One theme quietly connects them all.

Each, in its own way, asks what it means to belong to a place.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel introduces readers to contemporary Appalachia through the unforgettable voice of Demon, a boy growing up in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Inspired by David Copperfield, the novel confronts poverty, foster care, addiction, and the opioid crisis without ever reducing the region to those hardships alone.

Demon is fiercely funny, observant, and deeply rooted in the place that shaped him. Kingsolver portrays communities filled with generosity, loyalty, resilience, and humor alongside real struggles. The novel captures a tension found throughout Appalachian literature: a place can frustrate you, limit you, and break your heart, while still remaining part of who you are.

For travelers, Demon Copperhead offers something guidebooks cannot. It reveals the lived experiences behind the mountain landscapes, reminding readers that every valley and small town has stories that deserve to be heard.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson

Set in the hills of eastern Kentucky during the Great Depression, this remarkable novel follows Cussy Mary Carter, a Pack Horse librarian who delivers books by mule to families living in remote mountain communities. Each journey introduces another household, another hollow, another glimpse into daily Appalachian life. Books become lifelines, connecting isolated communities to knowledge, entertainment, and hope.

Cussy herself occupies a complicated place within that world. As one of Kentucky's "Blue People," she faces prejudice even as she dedicates herself to serving her neighbors. Her story reminds readers that belonging is not simply about where you live. It is built through relationships, generosity, and shared responsibility for one another. Those qualities remain part of what many travelers appreciate most when exploring Appalachia today.

Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier

Charles Frazier's beloved novel begins during the final years of the Civil War, but it ultimately becomes a story about home.

After suffering terrible wounds, Inman deserts the Confederate army and begins the long journey back to Cold Mountain and the woman he hopes is still waiting for him. Meanwhile, Ada Monroe struggles to survive on her family's farm with the help of the fiercely capable Ruby Thewes, whose knowledge of the land reflects generations of Appalachian life.

The mountains are far more than a backdrop. They shelter, challenge, isolate, and sustain the people who live among them. Every mile Inman walks deepens the novel's central question: what is worth returning home for? Few books capture the beauty of the Appalachian landscape so vividly, but its greatest achievement is revealing why that landscape matters so deeply to the people who call it home.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

For many readers, Bill Bryson provides the perfect introduction to Appalachia.

His decision to hike the Appalachian Trail with his hilariously unprepared friend Stephen Katz produces one of the funniest travel memoirs ever written. Their misadventures—aching legs, impossible climbs, questionable decisions, and frequent encounters with their own limitations—make the journey endlessly entertaining.

Yet beneath the humor lies genuine wonder. Bryson helps readers appreciate the extraordinary scale of the Appalachian Mountains and the trail that links them together. He reminds us why millions of people are drawn here every year, but the trail is only the beginning. It introduces travelers to the landscape. The stories of Kingsolver, Richardson, and Frazier introduce them to the people who have loved these mountains, struggled within them, left them, returned to them, and built lives among them for generations.

A Walk in the Woods remains one of the most beloved travel memoirs ever written. Click here to learn more about the wonderful Bill Bryson and to discover his remarkable work.

Reading Appalachia

No four books can explain a region as large and varied as Appalachia. Together, however, they illuminate one of the reasons so many travelers return. The mountains are undeniably beautiful. But what often stays with visitors is something less tangible: communities with deep roots, stories passed from one generation to the next, and the enduring connection between people and place.

Read these stories before you go, and the overlooks, mountain towns, and winding roads begin to tell a richer story of their own.

The links above take you to Bookshop.org, our preferred bookselling partner. Every purchase supports independent bookstores, and we're proud to partner with an organization that shares our belief in the enduring value of books and local bookshops.

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After 144 years, Barcelona has finally seen Antoni Gaudí’s greatest vision rise to its full height.

In February 2026, the final section of an enormous cross was lifted into place atop the Sagrada Família’s central Tower of Jesus Christ. Standing 172.5 meters above Barcelona, the completed tower became the tallest point of the basilica and the defining element of the extraordinary church Gaudí had imagined more than a century earlier. Its formal inauguration followed on June 10, exactly 100 years after the architect’s death.

Work around the basilica will continue, particularly on the Glory Façade and its surroundings. But the completion of Gaudí’s tallest and most important tower marked a historic turning point. A building known around the world for being unfinished had finally reached the height and silhouette its architect intended. The timing could hardly be more remarkable. Gaudí devoted the final decades of his life to a church he knew he would never see completed. A century after his death, Barcelona finished the central tower that crowned his design.

It would be easy to treat this as a curious story about a construction project that took an unusually long time, but the Sagrada Família tells us something much more interesting about Barcelona.

The city is filled with places that stop you in your tracks. Stroll down Passeig de Gràcia and apartment buildings seem to ripple and shimmer. Wander the Gothic Quarter and medieval streets suddenly open onto lively squares. Walk through La Boqueria and even a market feels carefully composed, overflowing with color and craftsmanship.

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And then there is the Sagrada Família.

Its towers seem almost alive, rising above the city like giant sandcastles sculpted from stone. The Nativity Façade is crowded with animals, plants, angels, and scenes celebrating life. On the opposite side, the Passion Façade is stark and angular, its figures carved with a severity that reflects suffering and death. The two façades feel almost as though they belong to different buildings, yet together they form part of a carefully conceived whole.

Inside, the experience becomes even more extraordinary. Massive columns branch overhead like trees, supporting a ceiling that seems to float above the nave. Gaudí designed the interior to evoke a forest, using geometry drawn from trunks, branches, shells, honeycombs, and other natural forms. Sunlight passes through stained-glass windows and spreads shifting blues, greens, reds, and golds across the stone as the day progresses. It is less like entering a conventional church than stepping inside a world imagined from the ground up.

The story began in 1882, when construction started on what was intended to be a relatively traditional Catholic church. Gaudí assumed responsibility for the project the following year and transformed it completely. Every façade would tell a different part of the Christian story. Eighteen towers would represent the apostles, the evangelists, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ. The central tower would rise above all the others, but remain slightly lower than nearby Montjuïc because Gaudí believed that human creation should never surpass the work of God.

As the years passed, the Sagrada Família became his life’s work. Gaudí gradually stepped away from almost every other commission and devoted himself increasingly to the basilica. When he died after being struck by a tram in 1926, only a small portion had been completed. For most projects, that would have been the end, but instead it became the beginning of a far longer story.

Construction depended largely on private donations and advanced slowly. During the Spanish Civil War, Gaudí’s workshop was attacked and many of his drawings, notes, and intricate plaster models were destroyed. Architects and craftsmen spent years reconstructing his intentions from surviving photographs and shattered fragments. Later generations used computer modeling, digital fabrication, and advanced stone-cutting techniques to realize geometries that would have been extraordinarily difficult to build when Gaudí first conceived them.

The Sagrada Família reflects a city that repeatedly chose craftsmanship over convenience, vision over shortcuts, and excellence over speed. Barcelona could have simplified the design, lowered its ambitions, or eventually declared the church finished enough. Instead, generations of architects, engineers, sculptors, stoneworkers, donors, and residents accepted responsibility for carrying an extraordinary idea forward.

That spirit feels woven throughout Barcelona. You see it in Catalan Modernisme, where apartment buildings such as Casa Batlló and La Pedrera reject the idea that practical structures must also be ordinary. You hear it inside the Palau de la Música Catalana, where sculpture, stained glass, mosaics, ironwork, and music come together in one exuberant celebration of Catalan culture. You find it in markets, workshops, restaurants, and neighborhood bakeries where presentation and technique are treated as expressions of pride rather than unnecessary decoration. Even FC Barcelona reflects the same belief that the city’s institutions can stand for something larger. Its famous motto, Més que un club—“More than a club”—expresses an identity extending far beyond sport.

The Sagrada Família may be Barcelona’s greatest expression of that idea.

Its completion is not remarkable simply because construction took 144 years. It is remarkable because the city continued pursuing Gaudí’s vision across wars, political upheaval, technological change, and the passing of generations. Barcelona did not merely preserve an unfinished masterpiece. It kept building one.

Most visitors arrive expecting to admire an extraordinary work of architecture. They leave having encountered something rarer: a city willing to devote more than a century to an almost impossible standard of beauty. Perhaps that is why the Sagrada Família feels so unforgettable. Not because it took so long to build, but because Barcelona never stopped believing it was worth building well.

One Book to Read Before You Visit

If the Sagrada Família leaves you wondering how one architect’s extraordinary vision came to define an entire city, there is one book we recommend above all others.

Gaudí — Gijs van Hensbergen (2001): A richly detailed biography that is as much about Barcelona and Catalonia as it is about Gaudí himself. Van Hensbergen traces the architect’s unconventional life, his fascination with natural forms, and the evolution of the Sagrada Família from an inherited commission into the consuming project of his final years. More than an architecture book, it reveals the imagination, religious conviction, cultural identity, and uncompromising pursuit of excellence behind the basilica that continues to define Barcelona.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, supporting independent bookstores with every purchase made through our links. To continue exploring the culture, history, and remarkable places of this endlessly fascinating country, visit the Travelreads Spain destination page.

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For anyone visiting Marrakech, staying in a riad offers one of the most distinctive ways to experience the city. Often tucked inside the historic medina, a riad is a traditional Moroccan house arranged around a private courtyard or garden. Many have been beautifully restored as intimate hotels, combining centuries-old architecture, exceptional design, and the feeling of being welcomed into a private home.

To understand Marrakech, it helps to begin there: closed to the street, open to the sky, and far more beautiful inside than anyone passing its walls could possibly know.

Inside the Medina

The Marrakech medina can be thrilling, confusing, beautiful, noisy, dirty, crowded, and rough around the edges—often within the same few minutes.

Its narrow lanes twist between market stalls, workshops, bakeries, small restaurants, mosques, and homes. Motorcycles edge past pedestrians. Carts rattle over uneven ground. Shopkeepers call from the souks, smoke rises from food stalls, and the streets shift constantly between commerce, neighborhood life, and spectacle. Most of the buildings reveal little from the outside. High walls and heavy wooden doors line lanes that can feel chaotic and enclosed. Even some of the city’s most beautiful houses remain almost completely hidden from view.

Then a riad door opens. Inside, the noise recedes. Light falls into a courtyard open to the sky. A fountain may sit beneath orange or lemon trees, surrounded by patterned zellige tile, carved plaster, painted cedar, lanterns, and shaded galleries. The air feels cooler. The pace changes.

In a higher-end riad, the craftsmanship can be extraordinary, but the luxury is rarely expressed through scale or display. It appears in the restoration, the quality of the materials, the quiet, and the attention given to every room and shared space. The contrast with the medina is immediate, but the riad does not feel separate from Marrakech. It reveals another side of the same city.

A House Turned Inward

Riads are part of a broader tradition of Moroccan urban architecture. They are not unique to Marrakech, but the city’s historic medina has become one of the best places for travelers to experience them as small hotels and guesthouses.

The word riad comes from the Arabic for “gardens”—a fitting name for a house designed around a private green space at its center.

The design is both cultural and practical. Thick walls and limited openings toward the street provide privacy and help protect the interior from heat, dust, and noise. Rooms face inward toward the courtyard, which brings light and air into the center of the house. The richest decoration is also concentrated inside. A relatively plain exterior may conceal tilework, fountains, carved wood, planted courtyards, and generations of Moroccan craftsmanship.

Hospitality at the Heart of the Riad

The architecture creates the setting, but hospitality defines the stay.

Most riads have relatively few rooms, allowing the service to feel more personal than it does in a conventional hotel. Guests may be welcomed with mint tea and pastries rather than directed toward a reception desk. The staff often help arrange guides, recommend restaurants, explain routes through the medina, and offer reassurance when the old city initially feels difficult to navigate.

Meals are a huge part of that welcome. A tagine may be prepared slowly and served in the courtyard. Breakfast may include Moroccan breads, fruit, eggs, yogurt, coffee, and tea. Staff members remember preferences, ask about the day, and make the riad feel less like temporary accommodation and more like a private home within the city.

That warmth matters in Marrakech. After hours in the intensity of the medina, returning to familiar faces and a quiet courtyard becomes an important part of the experience.

Above the Old City

Our favorite part of staying in a riad was breakfast on the rooftop.

Each morning, we climbed above the enclosed courtyard and narrow lanes to a protected terrace overlooking the medina. The streets below were mostly hidden, but the life of the city was still present. Rooftops stretched toward minarets, birds crossed the morning sky, and the Muslim call to prayer carried above the old city. Breakfast arrived slowly: Moroccan breads, fruit, eggs, coffee, and mint tea. The sounds of Marrakech drifted upward, softened by distance and the walls below.

It became one of the highlights of our trip.

The rooftop offered a different perspective on the medina. From the street, Marrakech can feel crowded and difficult to understand. From above, its flat roofs, terraces, minarets, and tightly packed buildings form a quieter landscape. On a clear day, the Atlas Mountains may appear beyond the city. The rooftop was not disconnected from Marrakech. It was a protected place from which to take it all in.

In the Heart of the Medina

Staying in the medina puts travelers within walking distance of the souks, restaurants, historic sites, and the daily activity of the old city. Marrakech begins just outside the riad door, making it easy to explore without repeatedly traveling in and out.

The advantage is having both experiences at once: immediate access to the energy of the medina and a quiet place to retreat whenever it becomes overwhelming. After a break in the courtyard or on the rooftop, the city is right there, ready to be entered again.

Reading Marrakech

These four books offer different ways to explore the city and the traditions surrounding it.

• The Riads of Marrakech — Elan Fleisher: A visual journey into twelve distinctive riads, revealing the courtyards, gardens, craftsmanship, and interiors hidden behind the medina’s walls.

• The Last Storytellers: Tales from the Heart of Morocco — Richard Hamilton (2011): A collection drawn from Marrakech’s oral storytelling tradition, preserving folktales once performed in Jemaa el-Fna.

• Marrakech Flair — Marisa Berenson (2020): Assouline’s richly illustrated celebration of the city’s colors, interiors, gardens, creativity, and unmistakable atmosphere. Explore more beautifully produced travel books from Assouline.

• Soul of Marrakesh — Zohar Benjelloun and Fabrice Nadjari: An intimate guide to the craftspeople, food, rituals, hidden places, and local personalities that give Marrakech its character.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, making it easy to discover these books while supporting independent bookstores.

Continue exploring Morocco through our curated collection of books chosen to reveal the country’s history, culture, landscapes, food, and traditions.

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Most people arrive in Mexico City expecting one thing: extraordinary food. They have read about restaurants that rank among the best in the world. They have reservations at Pujol or Quintonil, a list of tacos to try, and perhaps a bakery or two marked on a map. They expect remarkable meals, but that is only the beginning.

Spend enough time in Mexico City and food stops being the destination. It becomes the thread that ties everything else together. Follow that thread and it leads through the leafy streets and restored mansions of Roma Norte, the Art Deco buildings and neighborhood cafés of Condesa, the plazas and old family homes of Coyoacán, and the crowded streets surrounding the historic center. Along the way are contemporary galleries, independent bookstores, family-run tortillerías, and some of the most creative kitchens anywhere in the world. Before long, the restaurants become only one chapter in a much larger story. That story often begins in a market.

There is something endlessly fascinating about wandering through one of Mexico City’s mercados. Mercado de Medellín, tucked between Roma Norte and Roma Sur, is filled with produce, flowers, prepared foods, and ingredients reflecting communities from across Mexico, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Mercado de San Juan, closer to the historic center, has a more specialized character, known for unusual ingredients, seafood, cheeses, and foods sought out by professional cooks as well as curious visitors. Neither feels like a carefully staged attraction. Both remain working markets shaped by the people who shop and eat there every day.

Elsewhere, Mercado Jamaica overflows with flowers alongside produce, sweets, piñatas, and prepared food, while the market in Coyoacán reflects the livelier, more traditional side of a neighborhood often associated with Frida Kahlo, cobblestone streets, and shaded public squares. These places reveal different versions of Mexico City, but the rhythm is similar. Vendors arrange avocados, nopales, fragrant herbs, tropical fruit, and seemingly endless varieties of chile. Fresh tortillas emerge from warm presses. Bowls and pastes of mole sit beside nuts, seeds, spices, and ingredients that have shaped Mexican cooking for centuries. Families stop to buy dinner. Office workers linger over a quick lunch. The market is not separate from city life; it is one of the places where city life becomes most visible.

The remarkable thing is that this same rhythm continues into the city’s finest restaurants.

Chefs like Gabriela Cámara have earned international acclaim, but their work is remarkable not because it abandons tradition. It succeeds because it understands it so deeply. The ingredients, techniques, and recipes that appear in celebrated dining rooms often begin in the same markets that local families visit every day. The conversation between tradition and innovation never really stops; it simply changes settings.

That conversation can be felt across the city. In Roma Norte, old houses now hold bakeries, galleries, restaurants, and design shops, yet neighborhood food stands remain part of the streetscape. In Condesa, a walk beneath the trees of Avenida Ámsterdam might lead from coffee and pastries to a bookstore, a sidewalk lunch, or an unexpectedly memorable dinner. Farther south, Coyoacán moves at a different pace, with courtyards, plazas, markets, and older traditions that make central Mexico City feel momentarily distant.

And somewhere between breakfast at a neighborhood café, an afternoon wandering through Roma Norte, a visit to Cafebrería El Péndulo on Álvaro Obregón, and dinner that evening, something begins to shift. Mexico City becomes more than a food destination. It becomes a city of neighborhoods rather than landmarks. Of conversations rather than checklists. Of creativity rooted in everyday life rather than spectacle. The meals remain unforgettable, but they become part of something much larger.

Perhaps that is why the city’s food feels so memorable. It is not simply delicious. It tells a story about where people live, what they value, and how generations of tradition continue to shape contemporary life. That is also why Mexico City rewards reading as much as eating.

The books below continue that journey from different perspectives. Some introduce the markets and recipes that define everyday life. Others explain the chefs who have brought Mexican cuisine to global attention. One captures the culture and emotions woven into food itself, while another celebrates the beauty of the city through extraordinary photography. Together they reveal a Mexico City that is creative, sophisticated, deeply rooted in tradition, and full of surprises.

Reading Mexico City

CDMX: The Food of Mexico City — Rosa Cienfuegos (2024): A vibrant exploration of the markets, street food, bakeries, neighborhood cafés, and home cooking that make Mexico City's culinary culture one of the richest in the world.

My Mexico City Kitchen — Gabriela Cámara (2019): The celebrated chef behind Contramar shares recipes that demonstrate how contemporary Mexican cooking grows naturally from traditional ingredients, seasonal markets, and everyday techniques.

Mexico City — David Lida (2008): An engaging portrait of one of the world's largest cities, exploring its neighborhoods, architecture, history, contradictions, and remarkable cultural energy through the eyes of a longtime resident.

Like Water for Chocolate — Laura Esquivel (1989): One of Mexico's most beloved novels, where recipes become expressions of love, memory, family, and identity, reminding readers that food carries stories long before it reaches the table.

Mexico City: The Extraordinary Guide — Thibault Mommalier & Franck Juery (2025): Once you've discovered Mexico City through its food, this beautifully illustrated companion helps you explore the neighborhoods, markets, galleries, and hidden corners that give the city its unmistakable character.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org to support independent bookstores. The book covers below link directly to Bookshop, where every purchase helps support local booksellers while helping readers discover extraordinary places through books.

If this essay has inspired you to experience Mexico City more deeply, explore our complete Mexico bookshelf for additional books that celebrate the country's history, culture, cuisine, and remarkable places.

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There are beautiful cities, and then there are cities that seem to inspire creativity simply by existing. Savannah belongs in the second category.

Visitors often arrive expecting graceful squares, historic homes, and Spanish moss draped over centuries-old live oaks. Those are certainly part of its charm. But spend a little time wandering its streets, lingering in its cafés, browsing independent shops, or simply slowing down long enough to notice the details, and another story begins to emerge. Savannah is not simply preserving its past. It remains a place where history and creativity live side by side.

Unlike many destinations where art is confined to museums or cultural districts, creativity in Savannah seems woven into everyday life. It appears in thoughtfully designed restaurants and hotels, local galleries tucked inside historic buildings, artisan workshops, beautifully curated storefronts, and public spaces where people gather, sketch, photograph, and create. The city itself encourages observation. Every corner invites you to linger a little longer.

Perhaps that is no accident.

Savannah has long attracted people who value beauty. Its famous plan of interconnected public squares creates one of the most walkable and human-scaled cities in America. The architecture rewards curiosity rather than speed. Every block offers another elegant façade, hidden garden, or inviting corner worth exploring. It is the sort of place where wandering rarely feels aimless because there is always something beautiful waiting just ahead.

One of the most important chapters in Savannah’s modern creative story began in 1978, when the Savannah College of Art and Design was founded. Classes opened the following year with just 71 students; today, SCAD is one of the largest universities in the world devoted primarily to art and design.

Savannah offered an inspired setting for a new art and design school: remarkable architecture, a strong preservation tradition, and historic buildings with the potential for new life. As SCAD grew, it continued to expand through Savannah rather than retreating to a conventional, self-contained campus. Former schools, warehouses, theaters, commercial buildings, and other historic structures became classrooms, studios, galleries, residences, and performance spaces. What may have begun as a practical and imaginative way to grow gradually developed into one of the university’s defining characteristics.

SCAD did not create Savannah’s artistic spirit, but it recognized and amplified it. By restoring historic buildings instead of replacing them—and by bringing generations of artists, designers, architects, filmmakers, photographers, and creative entrepreneurs into the city—it helped shape the Savannah visitors experience today. History became the foundation for new ideas, demonstrating that preservation and innovation can flourish together.

Visitors may not always recognize SCAD’s influence, but they experience it throughout the city—in beautifully restored buildings filled with new ideas, independent boutiques showcasing local makers, thoughtfully designed cafés and hotels, public art, galleries, and a culture that values craftsmanship as much as preservation. Savannah’s history has not been frozen in time. It continues to provide the setting for new creativity.

Like all great creative cities, Savannah invites participation.

You may arrive planning to photograph the architecture. Instead, you find yourself lingering over a sketchbook in one of the squares. You wander into a gallery you had not planned to visit. You spend an hour browsing a bookstore (like this one with cats!). You begin paying closer attention to light, texture, craftsmanship, and design. Somehow, without trying, you start seeing the world a little differently. Perhaps that is Savannah’s greatest gift.

Reading Savannah

The books below explore several of the qualities that make Savannah such a distinctive destination—from its unforgettable characters and remarkable preservation story to its graceful urban design and culinary traditions. Together, they offer a deeper appreciation for a city where history inspires creativity, and creativity keeps history alive.

• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — John Berendt: A captivating portrait of Savannah’s unforgettable characters, elegant social world, and enduring sense of mystery.

• The Savannah College of Art and Design: Restoration of an Architectural Heritage — Connie Capozzola Pinkerton, Maureen Burke, and the SCAD Historic Preservation Department: A photographic history of how SCAD restored historic buildings and became deeply woven into Savannah’s creative identity.

• Savannah Square by Square — Michael Jordan and Mick McCay: A beautifully photographed journey through Savannah’s iconic squares and the design, architecture, and stories that distinguish each one.

• A Real Southern Cook: In Her Savannah Kitchen — Dora Charles: Part cookbook and part memoir, celebrating the recipes, family stories, and Lowcountry traditions rooted in Charles’s Savannah upbringing.

The books featured below have been selected to deepen the story of Savannah through its literature, architecture, design, and food. Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, where purchases help support independent bookstores.

Discover more books, stories, and destinations that bring the American South to life on the Travelreads American South Bookshelf.

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Long before Greece became a popular destination of whitewashed villages, ancient ruins, and islands scattered across brilliant blue water, it was the setting for one of the world’s greatest stories of travel.

The Odyssey is filled with shipwrecks, mysterious islands, dangerous strangers, generous hosts, restless gods, and a long journey across an unpredictable sea. Its world is fantastical, but it is also deeply rooted in the landscape and culture of Greece. Through the story, we begin to see a country shaped by the sea, by the importance of hospitality, and by a past in which history, archaeology, and storytelling remain closely intertwined.

Homer and the Origins of the Story

The Odyssey is traditionally attributed to Homer, the ancient Greek poet also credited with The Iliad. Almost nothing certain is known about Homer himself, and scholars still debate whether the poems were created by one poet or developed through a much longer oral tradition.

The poem was probably composed around the eighth century BCE, drawing upon stories that had been performed, remembered, and reshaped across generations. It follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, as he attempts to return home after the Trojan War—a voyage that stretches across ten years of storms, strange islands, monsters, enchantments, and divine interference.

The story belongs to a distant and legendary world, but the Greece it evokes is still recognizable: a country connected by water, divided into distinct communities, and filled with places where history and myth are difficult to separate.

A Culture Shaped by the Sea

It is difficult to understand Greece without understanding the sea.

The country’s mainland is carved by deep bays and long peninsulas, while islands stretch across the Aegean and Ionian Seas. For centuries, the water has connected Greek communities as much as it has separated them. It carried merchants, fishermen, soldiers, migrants, stories, and ideas from one shore to another. That maritime reality lies at the heart of The Odyssey. Nearly every stage of the journey begins or ends at the water. The sea offers passage, but never certainty. It connects one world to another while constantly threatening to push the traveler off course.

The same geography continues to shape Greece today. Ferries are part of ordinary life. Harbors remain gateways and gathering places. Islands separated by relatively short distances have developed their own identities, traditions, food, and architecture. Greece may be celebrated for the beauty of its coastline, but the sea is far more than a view. It has shaped the country’s communities, economy, imagination, and relationship with the wider world.

The Meaning of Hospitality

Again and again in The Odyssey, a traveler arrives in an unfamiliar place and waits to discover what kind of welcome lies on the other side.

The ancient Greek tradition of xenia described the bond of hospitality between a host and a stranger. A traveler was expected to receive food, shelter, protection, and conversation before being pressed to explain who they were or why they had come. In a world of dangerous roads and uncertain sea journeys, hospitality was not a small courtesy. It helped create trust between people who might otherwise have had no reason to trust one another.

Modern Greece is far removed from Homer’s world, but hospitality still carries a particular warmth and importance. Meals expand to include one more person. Directions turn into conversations. Visitors may be encouraged to sit, eat, drink, or stay longer than they intended.

These moments are not relics of an ancient custom, and Greek hospitality has not remained unchanged across three thousand years. Yet the importance placed on welcoming others has deep roots. The Odyssey helps us recognize that hospitality in Greece has long been more than politeness. It reflects generosity, dignity, and the responsibilities people accept when a stranger arrives at their door.

Where Story and History Meet

One of the most revealing things about ancient Greece is how often history and myth occupy the same ground. Although The Odyssey was composed centuries after the age it describes, its stories preserve echoes of an earlier world of fortified kingdoms, warrior rulers, and seafaring journeys.

Mycenae gives that world a striking physical presence. Visitors enter the citadel through the Lion Gate, beneath two carved lions that once symbolized royal power. Beyond it stand the massive Cyclopean walls, built from stones so large that later Greeks believed only giants could have moved them. Nearby, Grave Circle A contained royal shaft graves filled with gold masks, jewelry, weapons, and other treasures, while the remains of the palace rise above the site. Just outside the citadel, the vast beehive-shaped tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus reveals the engineering and ambition of Mycenaean rulers.

Standing among these massive walls and royal tombs, Homer’s world no longer feels quite so distant. Mycenae gives the legends weight, scale, and an extraordinary sense of place.

A Landscape Filled with Stories

Ithaca, the island traditionally identified as the home of Odysseus, offers a quieter example of the connection between place and story. Its coves, hills, and surrounding waters make it easy to see how a real landscape could become inseparable from a legendary one. The deeper appeal is not proving that a particular event occurred in a particular spot. It is recognizing how naturally the landscape seems to carry the stories attached to it.

This is true far beyond Ithaca. Across Greece, ruins, caves, mountains, islands, and stretches of coastline are associated with gods, heroes, battles, journeys, and transformations. Myth gives these places an additional layer of meaning, while the physical landscape makes the stories feel unexpectedly close.

The boundary between history, geography, and imagination is often impossible to draw—and that is part of what makes traveling through Greece so compelling.

Reading Greece

Traveling through Greece, it is easy to feel how closely landscape, history, and story are connected. The Odyssey may describe an ancient and imaginary journey, but its greatest value for travelers today is not simply the adventure itself. It offers a way to see Greece more deeply: as a country where geography shaped culture, storytelling preserved memory, and the sea, the ruins, and the myths continue to speak to one another.

These four books approach that layered story from different directions—through Homer’s original epic, two imaginative retellings, and a broader history of the Greek people.

• The Odyssey — Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (2017): A fresh, accessible translation of the epic journey that reveals Greece through its seas, islands, customs, and mythology.

• Circe — Madeline Miller (2018): A vivid retelling of the enchantress Circe’s life, bringing the gods, islands, and moral complexity of Greek mythology to life.

• Ithaca — Claire North (2022): A reimagining of Penelope’s story that explores power, survival, and life on Ithaca while Odysseus remains away.

• The Greeks: A Global History — Roderick Beaton (2021): A sweeping history of the Greek people, from the Bronze Age and Mycenae to modern Greece and the worldwide diaspora.

Travelreads is proud to partner with Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores through every purchase made on its platform.Explore more books that bring Greece’s history, culture, landscapes, and stories to life on our Greece destination page.