BETWIXT: Europe

THE LAST TOURIST - After Thomas Coryat (1577–1617)

Robin Hunt walked across some of Europe in the spring and summer 2007. In 2010 and 2011 he returned to finish the route, the poor man's Grand Tour: here's travel, cities, the country, art, love, literature, mirrors and printing presses. The Old Europe of 1608, the confused New Europe and much in between. The End (of the writing) is in sight...

Thursday, 7 June 2007

River







Posted by Robin Hunt at 14:48
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Near Montreuil

Near Montreuil
"I believe in the good life - and by "good" I don't mean prissy and puritanical. I think having fun, sex, travel and all those things are a rich part of the human experience. Our lives are less than a thousand months long and to make the best of it we need to have fun, form strong friendships and make the best of the gifts we have." A C Grayling in an interview in The Independent on Sunday, 8/4/07

Robin Hunt

Robin Hunt
France, 2009
"PERHAPS WRITING IS REALLY FILLING IN THE BLANK SPACES IN EXISTENCE?" Claudio Magris, Danube

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UPDATE: London, Nov 2012

I will return to finish the writing; the walking is done...but there is a super project now looming

The route to date:

. . . Pre-Trip
France - May

May 14-15 Calais
May 16 Boulogne
May 17 Montreuil-sur-mer
May 18 Abbeville
May 19-20 Amiens
May 21 Breteuil
May 22 Clermont
May 23 St. Leu
May 24 St. Denis
May 25-28 Paris
May 29 Fontainebleu
May 30 Montargis

France/Italy June

June 1 Briare
June 2 Nevers
June 3 Moulins
June 5-6 Lyon
June 7 Tour du Pin
June 8-9 Chambéry
June 10 La Chambre
June 11 Lansleburg, Val Cenis
June 12 Lansleburg, Val Cenis
June 13 Rivoli (Italy)
June 14-15 Turin
June 16 Vercelli
June 17-18 Milan
June 19-20Lodi
June 21
Pizzighettone

June 22-23Cremona
June 24-25Mantua
June 26 Lignano
June 27 Este
June 28-July 1 Padua
July 2 Pausa for Proustian Remembrance
Tom spent six weeks in Venice: I returned to a library, because I simply didn't know enough. Now armed with Byron, I return
August 7 Padua
August 8-12 Venice
August 13-28, across Northern Italy with a wounded Mac, which broke down eventually in the Swiss Town of Bad Ragatz. The stories of those places are for recollection in tranquility. Or I'll do them again, some day.
August 15 (2010) I start again...Thusis, Switzerland
August 20 Thusis
August 21 Splugen
August 22 Ems - Chur
August 23 Chur
August 24 Bad Ragaz
August 25 Zurich
August 26 Zurich
August 27 Towards Baden
August 28 Brucke
August 29 Rheinfelden
August 30 Basel
September 1-3 Strasbourg
September 4 Heidelburg
September 6Baden-Baden
September 8 Speyer
September 10 Worms
September 12Mainz
September 22 Frankfurt
September 24 Bingen
September 26 Bacharach
Oberwesel
September 29 St Goar
October 1Boppard
October 6 Back to Frankfurt

Now:
Koblenz
Andernach
Konigswinter
Bonn
Cologne
Dusseldorf
Duisburg
Rees
Emerich
Nijmegen
Tiel
Gorinchem
Dordrecht
Middleburg
Vlissigen


Beginners start here, for The Times' view
Or here for Day One



About BETWIXT: Europe

May 14. 400 years ago today an under employed Englishman whose London drinking friends included William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, John Donne and the teenage Prince of Wales, set out alone on a walking trip across Europe. Thomas Coryat, a Somerset-born bachelor of 32, began his trip in Calais after a nauseous crossing of the English Channel. He travelled, mostly by foot, up to Paris, down through Lyon, across the Alps into Italy, then made for Venice where he was to stay for a month and a half. The return journey took the traveller through Switzerland, Germany and Holland. On October 3rd Coryat returned to London after a three-day boat journey from Flushing on the Dutch coast, bringing with him news of a great new Italian invention: the fork.


FULLER DETAILS

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The Man Himself

The Man Himself
Tommy Coryat, wit, traveller and writer

Ben Jonson on Coryat

"He is an Engine. A Carpenter of Words"
Robin Hunt was born in London in 1958. He has lived in London, Cardiff, New York, Budapest and Ljubljana. A writer and photographer, he's worked for The Guardian, Observer, Sunday Telegraph, Times, Wired, Management Today amongst many newspapers and magazines. He was Associate Editor of Wired UK, and Head of New Media at The Guardian. His consulting clients included: Time Out, the Design Council, Frieze magazine and the Photographers' Gallery in the UK; MTV, Microsoft, Sun, Con-Edison and Pyramid in the US. Author with Francesca de Châtel of Retailisation, a study of the relationship of space and retail opportunity. He has been a visiting Professor at City University. Always he is completing a first novel, Not Everything That Flies, based on his experiences in Hungary, Romania and Slovenia (where he was the recipient of a PEN grant) between 2003 and 2005. In 2008 he began a doctorate on the mediation of ideas about terror; last spring he was the author of copycats - digital consumers in the online age. Currently he is listening to Jose Feliciano. His documentary about the readers at the British Library, produced by Vera Frankl, airs on Radio 4 on July 21.

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OVERHEARD

We are in Europe for two months, but we went to London first. Now we are here for three weeks.

Why Betwixt?

BETWIXT Is one of Thomas Coryat's favourite words. It sums up this project as well: I am not simply following Coryat, I'm exploring the histories and myths of the cities and towns he visited, and enjoying their moment now. I am genuinely in between - not reporter, nor pampered tourist; not historian, not entirely uninformed, I'm travelling with a Memory, a Memory Stick, and an openness to new Memories.
Betwixt def: Between, in the various senses of that word a) of local position lit and fig b) of time c) of other relations 2. among 3. Between whiles, at intervals, now and then…,

Mirrors all the way to Murano

Mirrors all the way to Murano
“The mirror will always remain haunted by what is not found within it.” Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, "The Mirror", 2001

Quote from Milan

“I believe that today lifestyle is important. It is no longer expressed with handbags or shoes. You express this with your travels, with your car, or helicopter. You express it in 360 degrees,” Gianni Versace SpA CEO Giancarlo Di Risio said at the 29th International Furniture Expo in Milan.

Reflections here

Harvard goes Time Travel because...

...that's what technology is all about. “The notion that we — in the early 21st century — are the first to experience a global economy and a complex, transnational system of economic and cultural exchange is manifestly mistaken. The 17th century had its own unique institutions and perspectives, but their states and individuals encountered problems and grappled with anxieties startlingly like our own,” Greenblatt said.

Publicity Tour, pre Frankfurt...

Publicity Tour, pre Frankfurt...
What the Jacobean PR suggested to Tom to push sales

RH: At the Surrealism Show, V&A, London, April 2007

RH: At the Surrealism Show, V&A, London, April 2007

Betwixt and Liminal

Contemporary Nomad

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Pre trip quotes

“In the beginning there was no Europe. All there was, for five million years, was a long, sinuous peninsula with no name, set like the figurehead of a ship on a prow of the world’s largest land mass.” Norman Davies, Europe

From Tommy's introduction...

...For what can be more pleasant then to see passing variety of beautiful Cities, Kings and Princes Courts, gorgeous Palaces, impregnable Castles and Fortresses, Towers piercing in a manner up to the clouds, fertill territories replenished with a very Cornucopia of all manner of commodities as it were with the horne of Amalthea, tending both to pleasure and profit, that the heart of man can wish for...

Elizabethan Docks, Dover

Elizabethan Docks, Dover

Tim Moore

Has made this journey in a second hand Rolls Royce. His book is fun.

Others Have Done This

From Tom's birthplace of Odcombe

Questions of Travel

Elizabeth Bishop ...Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?...
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