This journey from home becomes even more fantastic if you not only exchange your own room for the world you have never seen, but also the present time for the past. Because then you have the opportunity to live in strange and long-gone houses, to wander around dressed in worn-out period costumes, to travel in post coaches and small sailing ships, to breathe the dying air of bygone centuries; an exciting game in which you continually compare the past with the present, in which you also confront yourself. Travelling through Europe, these old travel books always exude vitality and a passionate cosmopolitan feeling, the magical aroma of distance and the chimera of the inaccessible. There is no more delightful reading than that of journeys into one's own past.
Stefan Zweig (Vienna, 1881 - Petrópolis, Brazil, 1942) was an enormously popular writer, both as an essayist and biographer ...read more
