Reading books can inspire you to travel, and travel can inspire you to read books. It’s what we call a delicious cycle.
On Episode 547: Travel the World by Book, we talk about the books (and other types of art) that have inspired not only particular trips, but the things that we have sought out while on that trip, or even things we have made a point to see in our own cities.
But this inspiration goes both ways, and sometimes the things we see when traveling inspire us to read more about them, whether in fiction or nonfiction. Listen in to our conversation about travel-inspired reading and reading-inspired travel.
You can listen right here, or find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, and elsewhere.
Related Episodes:
Episode 555: Scary Reads: Our Favorite Books for Halloween
Episode 351: Paris By The Book (with Liam Callanan)
Episode 76: BOOKS (with Nancy Pearl)
Here are 5 key points from the episode:
- Books can inspire trips to visit places mentioned or prompt further reading about topics encountered.
- Katy visited the Keats Shelley Museum in Rome, which inspired her to learn more about Romantic poets and write an essay.
- Tiffany’s husband took trips inspired by books and music, like visiting a hotel where Queen recorded an album.
- Katy used a New Orleans author’s memoir as a guide to explore locations from the book.
- They discuss the potential for literary walking tours and how books can lead to discovering new places and experience
Full Episode Transcript:
Katy
Hello. This is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall. Support for this show comes from you. If you have the means and you like to listen, please support this work at patreon.com/thebittersweetlifepodcast. There’s a link in the show notes, and please know you matter to the health and life of this show. Now, when a show is ten years old with over 500 episodes, there are a lot of great topics and shows in the archives, plenty you’ve probably missed. Today we’re going to revisit one of those conversations. Today we listen back to a conversation from February 21, 2021. I hope you enjoy it.
Introduction
Welcome to The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall. I live in Seattle, and I basically consider it my hometown at this point. My co host, Tiffany Parks, lives abroad in Rome. She’s been there now for over 15 years. And this show began in Rome when I moved abroad and lived there for just one year on Tiffany’s street. But we go way back. I met her on the school bus in 6th grade. If you’re curious about moving abroad or currently live abroad, or maybe you just absolutely love Italy or love contemplating and exploring, exploring the big themes of life, well, you’ve come to the right place. Don’t be afraid to dig around in the archives, even as far back as episode one. We’re on a journey here, and you will not regret it. Welcome to Rome. This is The Bittersweet Life with Katy Sewall and Tiffany Parks.
Katy
Hello. This is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall.
TiffanyÂ
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
And today we are going on a quest of sorts, inspired by books. In two ways, though, either a book that you read inspires you to go see something that you haven’t seen before, even if it means seeing something in your own town or taking a trip to go see something or you encounter something in the world that makes you go read about it more. And I got to thinking about this because tomorrow, Tuesday, February 23, is not only my birthday, but it is the 200th anniversary of John Keats death, the romantic poet. And on my last trip to Rome, I went to the Keats Shelley museum and saw the room where John Keats had died. And previously, I had already visited his grave, which is also in Rome. But after seeing where he died and noticing in that museum that he died on my birthday, which there is something about these shared dates that pique your interest sometimes I went kind of a little bit nuts reading about the romantic poets, not only Keats, but Shelley. And then on to Mary Shelley and whatever tumbling that takes you on Lord Byron, etcetera. And I also wrote this entwined essay about the death of John Keats, tangled up with the death of my friend Susan. Looking at these kind of long, languishing deaths mixed with death that is very sudden and unexpected, and love and grief and all these other themes that are so present in the time of COVID And tomorrow, that essay, which I never would have written had I not gone to that museum, is going to be published in Catapult magazine, which is a literary magazine, in honor of John Keats 200th anniversary of his death.
Tiffany
That’s wonderful. And a wonderful birthday present as well, kind of. In a way.
Katy
It is. It’s great. It will be great to have it out in the world. It’s actually an essay that I really, really love on multiple levels, but also just because you get to know John Keats and really, actually the people who survived him, the people who marked the occasion. And, of course, you and I were hoping that we’d be marking the occasion in person this year. You had suggested sometime like summer, fall, that I would fly to Rome and spend my birthday with you and with John Keats’s dead body, I guess his.
Tiffany
Tombstone, his beautiful, poetic tombstone, which people still leave flowers at.
Katy
Yes.
Tiffany
Not just on the anniversary of his death, but in regular times as well. I remember the very first time I went to the non catholic cemetery in Rome. I was definitely interested in Keats. I was not a huge fan. I mean, I’m more of a fan now that I’ve read more of his poetry, and I’ve been to the Keats Jolly museum. But at that time, I was like, I was interested. I wanted to see his tomb, and I was walking around looking for it, and I saw a young girl, probably 25, leaving flowers on his grave, very seriously, like, making sure they were nicely placed. She was taking a lot of care, and she was alone, and it was so quaint. So, yes, it would have been wonderful to visit there with you. I don’t know if the non catholic cemetery is open right now. It has been closed for the past few months, as have all the museums been closed, but they’re reopened museums, so I’m assuming it’s probably reopened as well. And if it is, I will go there in your honor.
Katy
Please do. And it’s actually, from all the research I’ve done, that section of the cemetery, for those of you who have been to Rome and have been to the non catholic cemetery, there’s one part of it that’s very built up. Lots of statues, lots of trees and bushes and flowers. It’s a very beautiful place. But the part of it that John Keats is in is almost an empty field, and he’s in the corner, and there’s not really that many graves. They’re sort of scattered about. And of course, it’s surrounded by traffic and the city. But in researching it more, I found that when he was actually buried there, it was just an empty field, and most likely the only things that were there were grazing sheep and shepherd boys sleeping.
Tiffany
Wow. And, of course, the pyramid was there.
Katy
Yes. Tell people what the pyramid is.
Tiffany
There’s an ancient pyramid in Rome that not everybody knows about. It’s in the piedami, the neighborhood named after it, or near Testaccio. So it’s not quite in the center. Center, center of Rome. It is the center, but it’s not like the center of the center. It was built in the first century AD. I can’t remember if it was the first century AD or the first century BC, but it’s based after Egyptian pyramids, a copy of an Egyptian pyramid on a much, much smaller scale, obviously, and with a different type of stone. But it’s definitely something to see. I remember the first time I saw it, I was like, what the. What?
Katy
Why is there a giant pyramid here? And when I lived in Rome in 2013, the pyramid was kind of black in color because of so much traffic. It was from pollution.
Tiffany
It was dark gray.
Katy
Yeah, dark gray. Some guy, I don’t remember, who was paying to have it cleaned and bring it back to its.
Tiffany
Some Japanese businessman.
Katy
Yes. Who somebody told me was obsessed with the color white, but I have no evidence of that.
Tiffany
No, no, no, that’s true. That’s part of it. I think I wrote an article about it. I used to pass it every single day on the bus ride to work. Every day. I watched the entire process of it being cleaned.
Katy
Yes. And now it is a bright white.
Tiffany
Yeah. It’s beautiful now. Beautiful.
Katy
Yeah. That’s what overlooks Keats grave. But anyway. But back to the other journeys that we’ve taken inspired by books or that we’ve read books after being inspired. I have one that’s kind of more quest like.
Tiffany
Well, I want to hear about your quest.
Katy
So this one’s kind of the opposite. So for those of you who are new to the show, a few seasons ago, I don’t know how many, I was living in New Orleans just temporarily to see what it was like to live there. And while I was there, back in episode 181, did an episode called Existential that was recorded in New Orleans. For that episode, I interviewed a local author whose name was Anne Gislison, and she wrote a book called the are a year of thinking, drinking, grieving, and reading. And it was a book basically about this group she had formed called the Existential crisis reading group that she formed after having multiple tragedies happen in her life. Her father passed away. Her two youngest twin sisters both died.
Tiffany
Oh, my lord.
Katy
And then other people in the group also have this loss, and they all come together trying to answer the question of how do you move forward, forward after something like that. All that is beside the point if you want to hear more about that. Episode 181, existential, but something I don’t even think I ever admitted to her prior to doing the interview is that I used her book as kind of a way to sort out locations in New Orleans because it was very rooted in New Orleans. So one of the first things I did was I went to Lafayette cemetery number one, which is in the garden district, and that’s where her family is buried. They have a family tomb there, and I spent a good part of an afternoon trying to find it. Based on what she said in the book, I did not succeed. But as a result, I got to see this really old cemetery. I think it’s one of the oldest in the city. It was started in 1833, and it’s beautiful. It’s surrounded by trees. It’s all these tombs that are up above the ground, so there’s a lot to see. And it’s kind of park. Like, the whole garden district is just beautiful mansions. And Anne Rice, the author of interview with a vampire, lives right around the corner and actually based some of her character locations in that cemetery. So it was kind of this great quest that she put me on. But then there was also little things, like there was a restaurant, which I don’t remember the name of it now, but her father always held all of his business meetings there. And so then I went and tried to find that restaurant, and I couldn’t afford to eat there, and certainly not alone. I thought that that would be way too indulgent, but I peeked in the windows, got a real sense of, oh, yeah, this is exactly the place that she described. So I basically just used her book as a tour guide book, even though it wasn’t, and just walked around in her life for an afternoon.
Tiffany
I love that. I mean, that’s kind of like what Liam Callinan was talking about on the episode a few weeks ago, Paris by the book, when he talks about how he went on the strip to Paris and brought his three daughters and gave them each a book set in Paris, and they had to guide them around the city based on those books. I think that is such a delightful idea to do at any age with any type of book.
Katy
Yeah. So what’s one that you’ve done in either direction?
Tiffany
Okay, I have to be honest. I feel like this is something I would do, but thinking really clearly and really searching my brain and racking my bookshelf. Or is it the other way around racking my brain and searching my bookshelf? I don’t know that I’ve ever done it consciously, but I have done it sort of unconsciously. And like you said, the other way. My husband is much more conscious about it. And I said to him, I said, have we ever been on a trip or even here in Rome, where we went looking for something that was based on something we read or on a piece of art, something? And he said, well, don’t you remember? On the very first trip we took together, we went to Montreux, Switzerland, where Queen recorded their final album. He is a huge queen fan. And we decided to go to Switzerland when we first started dating because I had to get a stamp in my visa. Actually, my stamp and my passport, because I was not legally living in Rome at the time. And since Switzerland is out of the schengen zone, you can go to Switzerland and get a stamp and your passport. So we took the train up to Bern, visited Bern. Lovely city. And he said, you know, since we’re up here, let’s go to Montreux. It was the middle of winter, right? So Lake Geneva was empty. There was nobody there. The hotel, it was one of those big grand hotels right on the lake that, during high seasons costs a fortune. But it was very inexpensive because it was December. We wandered around and, you know, there’s a big statue of Freddie Mercury, that famous pose that he has with his arm up right by the lake. And there’s, you know, the mountains that are of right on the COVID of the album. So that that we know was his thing. I happily went along. The other one that he mentioned, which is, again, something that he was interested in, was the summer of 2019. We were on the californian coast, starting in Monterey and heading down. And when we were in Monterey, he had actually just read Cannery Row, which is, of course, based there. I have never read it by John Steinbeck. We did sort of wander around and look at the famous canning company. I can’t remember what it’s called and walk around the streets and up to the waterfront. There’s a statue, or I think a bust of Steinbeck there. And so that was another one that he thought of.
Katy
Yeah, that’s a good one.
Tiffany
Yeah, it’s a good one. I mean, the main one for me, and I know we’ve talked about this in terms of the film Aruba, the view, but rum with a view was also a book. Obviously, it was first a book. And I read the book the day after I saw the movie. I went out and bought it and read it the same day. I was obsessed. And so the book to me is very meaningful as well. So I read the book when I was twelve, and then when I was 14, I went to Florence for the first time, went to Italy for the first time with my mom and my sister, and of course, tried to retrace the steps as much as possible of the places she goes in Florence. I mean, I was 14. I was with my mom. We were only there for a couple days. I remember walking through the Santa Croce church and looking at the tombs on the ground in the church, just like Lucy, honey, church does. And of course, I remember being in Piazza della Signoria, the main piazza in Florence, and I remember a whole section of it being blocked off because they were doing restorations. I was at the point of tears because I couldn’t go up into where all the statues are. I remember like it was yesterday. I wish I could post this photo, but of course, who knows where it is? I remember my mom taking a picture of me and she was like, try to look happy. Why do you look so depressed? I was like, because I can’t go and be where Lucy was.
Katy
Oh, that’s so cute.
Tiffany
But that’s really the only other one. I remember lots of other ones going the other way, though.
Katy
For those of you who are new to the show, Tiffany in part, not completely, but in part, was inspired initially to move to Italy because of a room with a view. So great power in that story. I mean, of course there were many other things.
Tiffany
There were many other things. But that was the spark. That was the spark that really lit my love of Italy in general and my love of opera, because there’s opera in that movie.
Katy
Very much so.
Tiffany
I have always had that romantic view of Italy that Em Forster captures so perfectly well.
Katy
I have another example that’s more quest like. Okay, this one actually was from a non fiction book. So I also lived in San Francisco during the course of this show. And when I was in San Francisco, I met a woman who was actually from Seattle. Her name was Denise Clifton and she was in town talking about her book called tables from the how the restaurants that arose after the great quake of 1906 still feeds San Francisco today. It’s basically a book that’s full of the history of the restaurants that came to be after that earthquake. And sometimes they came to be as like a little hut on the side of the road. Sometimes they came to be in a much grander manner. For me, I kind of used it as a tour guide of where to walk to go find these iconic restaurants that had been around since that time because they were scattered throughout the whole city. It also took me to different neighborhoods. So I’d be like, oh, I’m going to walk to Chinatown today and I’m going to find this place. Or I’m going to walk to little Italy and I’m going to find this place. But two of the places that really stand out. One of the places that burned the ground during the San Francisco earthquake was a brand new, very opulent hotel called the Palace Hotel. And apparently it burning to the ground and the ruins that it left are one of the most iconic images from that period of time. They rebuilt the hotel right afterwards as kind of a statement of this city will not die because of this happening. We will still be the paris of the west. We will rebuild this amazing hotel. So they built this room in the center of this hotel that’s open to anybody. And I think it’s called the garden room. And it’s full of windows, almost like you’re sitting in a greenhouse. There are 7000 pieces of colored glass. There are huge columns in italian marble. And they have these chandeliers that I looked it up are 6ft tall. They’re massive, my lord, and anybody can go and sit there, you don’t have to be staying at the hotel. So I just would start going there from time to time just to write in this beautiful open room. And they didn’t even bother you. Like you didn’t even have to order anything.
Tiffany
Oh my gosh, how wonderful.
Katy
Every now and then I would order an extremely expensive cup of coffee because as you can imagine it was very pricey. But it was a great find. And of course one I would not have found without this book. And actually a small little detail. As you know, if you listen, I work for the author, Jess Walter. I help him out with things. He just came out with a book called the Cold Millions and he was working on a scene set in a very rich man’s house. And so I was taking pictures of that room, sending him photos, like, here’s an idea. Look at this. Look at this. And then I pointed out that one of the most opulent things about the room was that here it was in the middle of winter and it was full of orchids. And we were laughing about, yes, that is the height of richness, where you can have hundreds of orchids when it’s completely off season. And his character in the book has a bunch of orchids.
Tiffany
Oh, nice.
Katy
So it’s one book translating into another book. I mean, one of the only other places she points out that I really remember is she pointed out this place called John’s Grill, which is apparently the restaurant where Dashel Hammett used to hang out a bunch starting in 1920. He’s the author of the maltese Falcon and a whole bunch of other mysteries. So you can actually go see a bus to the maltese falcon that’s sitting in the same room that he used to drink and eat in. I think it was right around the corner from his apartment or something. So he basically lived there. That’s a person who’s a writer and into people like that. It was a fun place to go and sort of sit in the room and be like, he was here working on his writing.
Tiffany
Oh, I bet.
Katy
So that’s another place that she pointed out to me, you know, all these places I might have found, but I wouldn’t have known anything about the history without this book.
Tiffany
That is cool.
Katy
But you do that all the time, like, read about the history. I mean, Caravaggio alone, you know?
Tiffany
Yeah, I’m a little. I mean, I. If I do a themed tour in a city that I’m traveling to, if I do that kind of thing, I notice that they’re generally more history inspired, like a tour of the places that the Borgias lived, you know, or all of the art that they commissioned or. I remember when Claudio and I were. I guess it was the first year we were together. We went on a Michelangelo day, like, we went all over the city, like, in search of works by Michelangelo. The time that I went to Vienna to hear the Requiem on the very end, the anniversary that was, I guess it was the 250th anniversary of his death. They played the requiem that he wrote. Obviously, at the moment that he died, like, it finished at the moment that he died.
Katy
Apu’s death. You didn’t mention.
Tiffany
Sorry. Mozart. Mozart’s Requiem. And in the Steven Stomm, which is where he had his funeral. You know, that kind of thing. Definitely. Art is involved because you know, I’m going to see the works of art or I’m going to hear the music, but also very historic. But I like the idea of doing a book themed tour as well, picking a book, going to the city where it takes place, and going to all those places. I don’t think that I’ve ever done that. But I will say with a little bit of pride that I know for a fact that at least a couple of families have done that in Rome for my book.
Katy
Yeah.
Tiffany
Because they told me about it.
Katy
Yeah. Midnight in the piazza. And your book is actually a good one for that because it kind of happens in a not too big of an area.
Tiffany
Exactly. Yeah. Almost completely in the jewish ghetto. I actually found. Because every so often, you google yourself, you google the name of your book.
Katy
To see if anybody’s ordering it, to.
Tiffany
See if anyone’s written about it. Yeah. To see if any new articles. That’s how I found it. It was on the LA Times bestseller list almost a year after it was published.
Katy
Oh, that’s great.
Tiffany
I googled it and I was like, oh, my gosh, one week in January of 2018. Hey, I’ll take it.
Katy
Sure.
Tiffany
But I found this blog post by this family, and they had traveled there, I didn’t know them, and they had pictures of their son holding my book, like, standing in front of the turtle fountain or standing in front of Palazzo Matei. Oh, my gosh. They took a tour based on my book. It was incredibly flattering.
Katy
That’s so sweet. Yeah. That’s so good.
Tiffany
Yeah.
Katy
Well, have you read a book recently that would be inspiring enough to you to want to go somewhere?
Tiffany
Yeah, I scrolled a couple down. I mean, there’s one place that it wouldn’t be so much a tour as I want to go to this place because of how, how it was described in the book. The book is called the Cleaner of Chartres. I think it’s by Sally vicars. I don’t even know how I would describe it as far as genre. It’s not literary fiction, but it’s not fluff fiction either. It’s really thoughtful and nice, although it’s a very easy read and very enjoyable read. And it takes place in the city of Chartres, France, I think, in modern day or very recent past. And it’s about a young woman who cleans there. She cleans at the cathedral, the famous cathedral of Chartres. And I’ve never been there. It’s in northern France, and the way it was described. And there’s some kind of decoration on the floor that’s sort of a mystery. It’s a maze or it’s some kind of puzzle, and no one’s ever figured it out. And I love stuff like that. So I really like to go there.
Katy
Yes, for sure. I want to go there just to look at the puzzle on the floor.
Tiffany
Yeah, yeah. I can’t remember. It’s been several years now since I read it, and, I mean, there’s so many. I mean, when I was looking through my books, I was like, oh, these are places where I would like to do that. I just never have done it. And then places that I’ve sort of done in reverse. I went to the Tower of London. I was absolutely fascinated by it. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there.
Katy
No, I’d like to go.
Tiffany
Oh, it’s just such. The only thing I can compare it to is sort of visiting, like Castel Sant’Angelo. Same sort of idea. This place that is so steeped in history, you can just feel it. You just know you’re walking on ghosts as you were there. And it was later that I read, I think I probably started reading a little bit of tudor history and historical fiction because I was sort of fascinated by the period because of visiting there. And I remember learning, actually, probably I learned it on the tour. They pointed out Anne Boleyn’s sort of quote unquote prison. It wasn’t a prison. It was probably an apartment. But where she was living when she was waiting to be executed, she could see out her window the scaffold being built where she was going to be executed. She was watching them build it.
Katy
That’s awful.
Tiffany
Isn’t it? Just morbid. That stuck with me. And then, of course, I read the other Bolin girl, and of course, I read Wolf hall and bring up the bodies and wonderful works of tudor historical fiction. And I definitely thought back on my time at the Tower of London, and now I really want to go back.
Katy
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. So one other example that I thought would just add a different layer to this is not somewhere I actually went, but we’ve talked about on the show before that one of the books, one of the expat books that I really like, or traveling books, maybe it’s even more of a traveling book than an expat book, is the book third wish by Robert Fulghum. It’s a five volume fictional account of these three people in the different places they go around the world. And it’s very lighthearted, and it’s very creative, and it’s also worth checking out. Comes with a cd that you can listen to, so you can actually hear the music that plays in that character’s head.
Tiffany
That’s so cool.
Katy
It’s a very multidimensional reading experience. So that book actually technically ends in Seattle on Queen Anne Hill, and it’s accompanied with all these paintings of where they are. So if you wanted to do a walking tour, it would be very easy. But that book inspired me to try to find and befriend Robert Fulghum because I wanted to know the person who wrote this book, who was the person behind this amazing thing, and eventually listen back if you want to hear the whole story. But eventually, I do get in touch with him and we do become friends. But anyways, so part of this book takes place at Monet’s garden in France. And I had no means at that time to travel to France. So knowing that Robert instead got me this pop up book, the most elaborate pop up book I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I think it was called a walk in Monet’s Garden, and it basically let you reconstruct what his entire garden looked like. So you got to see the whole layout of where the flowers were, the shape of the greenhouse, what the pond would have looked like, where he would have sat, the paint. It was the one example of somebody actually bringing the experience to me, saying, of course you can’t go, but why don’t you spend the afternoon with this thing and build this little diorama for yourself? And it’s almost as if you get to go for a day.
Tiffany
That is so cool.
Katy
Yeah, it was really very sweet. Well, I would love to hear from you listening, if there’s any inspired trips in either direction, either you write a book and you went or you went and then you read a book. I’d love to hear more of those stories. You can always email us at bittersweetlifepodcast@gmail.com. bittersweetlifepodcast@gmail.com or at the contact us page at the www.thebittersweetlife.net.
Tiffany
We’re also on social media, of course, so you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Just search for The Bittersweet Life.
Katy
And please do friend us on one of those things, because I would love to have you all read this article that I wrote about Keats.
Tiffany
Yes.
Katy
And tell me what you think. That way we could all honor the 200th anniversary of his death, but I would love to hear your thoughts about it. And Tiffany, of course, will spread it around all over social media.
Tiffany
I will spread it.
Katy
Okay, great. Well, and until next time, this is The Bittersweet Life. I’m Katy Sewall.
Tiffany
I’m Tiffany Parks.
Katy
Join us again. Bye. Thanks for all the ways you support us. Give us a good rating on iTunes, maybe five stars if you like the show, it will help other people discover that we exist. Thank you. You’re the best.
