What kind of travel books will you be taking on holiday with you this year?

I was in my local bookshop last week, feeling overwhelmed at the number of bibles and guides, each promising to tell me everything I needed to know about everywhere, from New York City to Easter Island.

It occurred to me that Dante had managed to get all the way round the seven circles of Hell, with only Virgil pointing put the sights, so why did I need eleven volumes about Florence?

Of course, in those days, Hell was not a tourist attraction; no need to find the cheapest place to spend a fiery night, or discover where to get a lead cloak exactly like the ones worn by the local Hypocrites.

There are plenty of Hells to visit this summer, and many of them will come with glowing recommendations. Flights to the City of Dis are leaving Luton and Stanstead every half an hour, and the usual interpretative skills apply when trying to discover exactly what is to be found at the other end:

‘Bustling’- Oxford Street on Sea. ‘Bright’ – lights left on all night. ‘Young Scene.’ –  undressed vomiting teenagers. ‘Night life.’ – undressed vomiting adults. ‘Family friendly’ – feral children, fat parents. chips with everything.

A good guidebook should at least be able to warn against the poetic license taken by so many tour operators and Internet sites when describing their patch of earthly paradise. In that sense, guide books are the modern equivalent of Here Be Monsters – the usual fanged leviathan routinely drawn on ancient travellers’ maps, and now sadly missing from the scarred battle sites of mass tourism.

I have taken to going back in time with my travels – not by Tardis, though I am sure that will happen one day, but by searching for out-of-date or out-of print travel writing.

The best books do not date – and that applies to travel writing as much as it applies to poetry and fiction. True, the place may be no longer recognisable, and you may hunt all day for a café that was bombed in the war, or a particular shop that sells only lavender soap, (now Starbucks). It doesn’t matter; the hunt becomes a private journey, and therefore immeasurably precious is a world where we are all doing the same things and calling it freedom of choice.

A private landscape in a public place can only happen imaginatively. An old map and a long forgotten guide can re-open a place to its own past, and give a sense of continuity as well as romance. It is not necessary to stand dutifully on a preserved ruin or visit a museum to feel the history of a city; it is better to find the layers for yourself – a kind of virtual archaeology where whatever you discover will be yours to keep.

Sometimes the experience is unbearably sad; reading HV Moreton In The Steps of Saint Paul, is a journey through Arabia that cannot be made. So many of the wonders he describes, the gardens and walled towns, have been bombed to bits or displaced for oil. So many of the ordinary scenes – the tiny scrubbed table set with a single cup of thick coffee and a dish of honey, will never return. Yet to read his descriptions is more than history or nostalgia; it is to understand how completely we can lose things of infinite value because we did not value them when they were there.

To evoke a place imaginatively is to find it through its many layers and strange incarnations. Rome is a city where the past is habitually present, but the inspired re-issue of Palladio’s Roman writings will be better than any amount of guided tours or ruin-mongering. What could be a more satisfying small adventure than boarding the Rome Express in Paris, travelling through the Alps by night, and arriving at Rome station with Palladio?

It is a cliché that we cannot know anywhere by visiting it, but only by inhabiting it, yet there is more than one way of inhabiting a place. The life of the mind can leap ahead of the body but to do this it needs to occupy more than temporal space. A good guide book may tell us all we need to know about wherever we are now, and include its history, but it cannot include its disappeared life. For that we need what we always need; a writer.

August 6, 2006