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Summary: Petronius was my drinking buddy...
Review: I loved this book! I knew the Romans liked a good drink but had no idea they were quite so curious and intellectually voracious -- they traveled around to all the great sights of the Empire (the Seven Wonders tour) and managed to invent on the way guidebooks, souvenirs and shoddy hotels! The author does a great job of bringing history to life by making connections to the present -- and with a great sense of humor. My favorite chapter was in Arcadia (Greece), which I've been to -- Perrottet (sp?) runs into a mad monk in the middle of a thunderstorm, and ends up deep in a philosophical discussion on the meaning of travel, ancient and modern. It really is a great way to learn about things that every educated person should already know... (Petronius, Seneca and all the gang -- I vaguely knew who they were, but now they're like old drinking pals!)
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Summary: the straight Bruce Chatwin
Review: I picked up this book when I read a couple of Perrottet's stories in the Sunday Times here in London... Like most people, I have a vague working knowledge of ancient history, mostly gleaned from old 'I, Claudius' repeats on BBC, but I love traveling in the Mediterranean (I go every year to Italy or the Greek Islands). I found the book to be an absolute eye-opener, making these great connections between the ancient world and what we see and experience today. The idea of Roman tourists going to all the places that I love, reading papyrus scrolls and fighting with irritating tour guides, and even hiring professional stone cutters to inscribe graffit in Homeric verse, really made me see things in a different way. I think the book is actually side-splittingly funny as well as being incredibly learned and informative, and it probably should be made into a movie of some kind. Perottet's wanderings are just as adventurous as other travel writers who go to remote and supposedly exotic places -- except that he's able to wring some real fun out of places that we've all seen before. If you're going anywhere near the Mediterranean this year, pick up this book. You'll never see the Colosseum (or Parthenon or the Pyramids) the same way again...
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Summary: fascinating vision of the ancient world
Review: I recently read an articles of Tony Perrottet's (in the Believer, on in ancient Roman literary reading craze) and was inspired by its mix of erudition and humor to seek out this book. I'm a great traveler, and this was exactly what I was looking for! Anyone with an interest in Italy, Greece or Egypt -- or who enjoys entertaining history -- will get a kick out of this. It's a completely new world to me -- who would have thought the ancient Romans were inveterate sightseers? All the material about ancient guidbooks, souvenirs, tour guides and the like really brought the past to life for me. And it was hilarious!
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Summary: A Great Read
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed reading this fascinating and original travel book. It is extremely well researched and gives us an erudite but very accessible insight into the quirky but familiar travel habits of the Ancient Romans. It is also very amusing and I found myself laughing out loud on a number of occasions.
I have recommended Route 66 AD to all my traveller friends. I wish it was Christmas - I know what I would buy them!!!
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Summary: Time-travel for under $15!
Review: If you have any interest in Classical history (especially the more human, socio-economic and religious aspects) and/or enjoy tongue-in-cheek travel writing by authors such as Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods) and Tony Horwitz (Confederates in the Attic), then pick up Tony Perrotet's illuminating and hillarious look at tourism, ancient and modern. At just under fifteen dollars, this book provides entertainment and erudition without the need for mortgaging the home on airfare, Mediterranean tourist trap hotels, Russian made rent-a-car deathtraps or dodging terrorists at the Valley of the Kings. Pagan Holiday is a a great summer escape!
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Summary: Around the Mediterranean in 80 days or 2000 years
Review: If you're worried that your desire to see Pompeii, the Parthenon, or the Pyramids makes you just 'one of the crowd,' Tony Perrotet's "Route 66" will make you feel instead like you are following an ancient and hallowed tradition. Ancient Romans also trod the paths to Naples, to Athens, Olympus, Turkey, Alexandria, Luxor, etc. They even left graffiti! Perrotet's book reports a trip taken by the author and his pregnant girlfriend (Les) on a modern reenactment of the trips taken by the cultured classes of the ancient world.Most travelogues rise and fall on the personality (or lack thereof) of their authors. If you like the writer, you'll like his/her observations about travel. Tony Perrottet is quite charming, in an Aussie-game-for-anything-and-looking-for-a-bit-of-trouble kind of way, but he's also erudite and witty, so the book wins points from me not only because I enjoyed 'spending time' with the author but because I learned a lot of new things. Perrotet reports from ancient sources on how the Romans traveled, where they went, what they complained about and praised, even what tschotckes and souveniers they liked to buy. I learned, for example, that 70% of the personal letters known from the ancient world were in a single stash of papyri found in Egypt only about a century ago. I learned of statues that bear graffiti from the last century as well as from 2000 years ago. Perrotet weaves these little gems seamlessly into the modern narrative of the himself and Les gamely braving bad plumbing, incoherent signs, stomach flu, etc. in order to find the wonders of the ancient world. Perrottet even goes scuba diving off the coast of Naples to investigate a city that fell into the sea eons ago, which he finds among the candy wrappers and less savory leavings of modern times. There's something perfectly right about him doing this in anticipation of the arrival of his first child, although I did feel pretty sorry for poor Les, who spent the better part of her 2nd trimester holed up in strange hotel rooms with the flu and the particularly bizarre selection of old American films shown on Mediterranean TV. But everyone made it home just fine, and Perrottet leaves you with lots of wonderful memories of his trip...and even of the trips of Antony, Cleopatra, Hadrian, and the like. It's a thoroughly enjoyable book, perfect for traveller-lovers and history-lovers alike.
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Summary: Used to Be "Route 66"
Review: In the year 5 BC, the Roman Emperor Augustus was presented with a small oval map of the known world. A larger version was hung in the public colonnade. There the public could see the known world as it stretched from Spain to Britain to India to Arabia to Northern Africa. For its time the map itself was a feat. A team of Roman scientists had poured over the charts of surveyors sent to every corner of the Empire. The map inspired the first tourist industry in the world. The Grand Tour of Antiquity started in Rome, of course, wound through the Greek Isles and Asia Minor, and then sailed up the Nile to Aswan. Tony Perrottet calls this the "Route 66" of Antiquity and aptly calls the first edition of his book by that name. Inspired by the map, Perrottet decides to make the same trip. This book is a combination of what it was like to travel in Antiquity and what it is like to travel the same route today. Though separated in time by 2000 years, so much of travel is still the same. I cannot help but notice that Perrottet has written about the wilder, crazier, mis-adventurous side of traveling. His travels are like those currently portrayed on the Travel Channel. I cannot help but picture him with a sly grin on his face as he tells the stories of his travels. After this one should read Lionel Casson's _Travel in the Ancient World_ (which Perrottet depends upon quite a bit) just for comparison.
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Summary: A good travelogue
Review: Interesting book. I was hoping it would delve deeply into each and every single ancient visiting point, but it doesn't.
Perrottet's conversational style begins with his delving through ancient sources and realising that the history of tourism begins in the 1st century AD with the settled pax romana. With his pregnant wife, Les, he decided to take one last trip and where better than to follow the original tourist trail.
Beginning in Rome and dropping down to Naples (his imagery is bitingly humorous), Capri, Puteoli and thence to Brundisium, through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt his narrative is more focused on his experiences of travelling the ancient routes and how the tourism compares to those indicated in the literary sources.
I was expecting a factual description of each point with details compared to those of the ancients, but what you actually get is a pleasing commentary on the realities of the original package holiday and how much it differs from those tantalising glimpses we get through authors such as Marcellianus, Juvenal, Petronius et al.
Thoroughly enjoyable I have no doubt this will prompt similar journeys following the ancient Romans.
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Summary: A glass of Mummy's Armpit, perhaps?
Review: PAGAN HOLIDAY is descriptive, instructive and marvelously entertaining - prerequisites, in my opinion, for a 5-star travel essay. Author Tony Perrottet follows the tourist route of the ancient Romans from Italy to Greece to Turkey to Egypt. It's vaguely reminiscent of Eric Newby's ON THE SHORES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN. Newby traveled his route with his long-suffering wife, Wanda. Tony is accompanied by his significant other, Les, who raises the bar on tolerance and patience by enduring the trek through the second trimester of pregnancy into the third. In the Acknowledgments, Perrottet gives his intrepid companion credit: "All of the best jokes in the book are hers." Starting in Rome, the high points of the itinerary include Naples, Capri, Pompeii, Athens, Corinth, Sparta, Olympia, Delphi, Delos, Rhodes, Ephesus, Pergamum, Troy, Alexandria, Cairo, Thebes, Aswan, and points in between. Tony describes the experiences, both good and bad, of the old Romans on that same pilgrim path, as well as those of Les and himself. Of course, some of the most entertaining for the reader were the worst for the traveler, as when Tony and Les rent a Russian car, a Donco, for tooling around Greece. By the time they approach Sparta: "... we'd taped a sheet of plastic over the broken window, and tied coat-hanger wire around my door so it wouldn't pop open whenever the car stopped ..." And the ancients had their own horrors to contend with, as a certain Apollinarius Sidonius experienced during his night's stay in a "greasy tavern": "His hard-reed bed was hopping with lice; all night, lizards and spiders fell from the ceiling." Whether diving the ruins in the Bay of Naples, consulting a present-day Delphic oracle, dealing with border customs officials, contending with crowded beaches and erratic ferry schedules, exploring the remnants of Troy or the interior of the Great Pyramid, coping with on-the-road illness, examining mummies up close and personal, barging down the Nile, bar crawling in Alexandria, or changing rooms (five times) at Cairo's Windsor Hotel, Tony and Les proceed with a great, good humor probably stretched thin many times during the odyssey. And what he doesn't experience himself, Tony does his best to describe from the accounts of others, such as the consultation of omens, the Olympic Games, a gladiatorial show, Roman seaside orgies, and a Roman bath. Perrottet fills his narrative with fun, arcane trivia. Did you know that Delphic love philters included such ingredients as horse sweat and minced lizard's flesh? Or that a twenty-five percent duty was levied on dancing girls brought back as souvenirs? Or that Greek female hoteliers had the occasional reputation of being witches, who turned male guests into frogs or sex slaves?. The text in PAGAN HOLIDAY is interspersed with illustrations, including some photos taken himself, but more often from other sources. Tony found paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadena particularly useful. The one photo sorely missing was that of the hardiest trooper of them all, Les. And Mummy's Armpit? It's the slang name for a smelly Nile wine. You won't find it in your local Trader Joe's.
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Summary: A wandering road
Review: Perottet's travel book delightfully flies in the face of travel book convention and hard-core backpackers everywhere. Instead of searching for the unbeaten path, Perottet and his pregnant girlfriend follow the most beaten tourist path they can possibly find: the tourism trails of the ancient Romans. It's an enjoyable combination of history--giving some measure of personality to the long-dead Roman aristocracy--and the modern travelogue, as Perottet and partner fight the crowds and the bureaucracy of the modern Mediterranean. Overall, it's a light and enjoyable read, and I don't mind recommending it. However, Perottet really strains at times to connect the historical facts of Roman tourism with his modern-day adventures. The link is weak more often than not. After reading the entire book, I'm convinced that ancient Roman tourists did exhibit many of the same tendencies as the camera-toting travelers of today, but the very frequent attempts (intentional or otherwise) to make them seem like us, except with togas, weakens the book. Perottet deserves credit for his research and an original idea, and if you're looking for a book to go on the bedstand, you could certainly do worse.
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