The <b>*Geographica*</b> (Ancient Greek: Γεωγραφικά, Geōgraphiká), or <b>*Geography*</b>, is an encyclopedia of geographical knowledge, consisting of 17 'books', written in Greek by Strabo, an educated citizen of the Roman empire of Greek descent. Work can have begun on it no earlier than 20 BC. A first edition was published in 7 BC followed by a gap, resumption of work and a final edition no later than 23 AD in the last year of Strabo's life. Strabo probably worked on his Geography and now missing History concurrently, as the Geography contains a considerable amount of historical data. Except for parts of Book 7, it has come down to us complete.
Join the 13th century merchants Marco, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo as they journey from their native city of Venice to the faraway land of Cathay, or China. There, young Marco will meet Kublai Khan, the ruler of the vast Mongolian empire. Read about his many adventures serving the Khan in the lands East of Europe, and his adventures coming back home to Venice. This medieval book, dictated by Marco while imprisoned in Genoa, was one of the inspirations of the Age of Exploration during the Renaissance, and it still intrigues readers today to learn of the Polo's adventures in the far East.
Henry James was not only a great Victorian novelist. He was also one of the great travel writers of all time. Traveling in Italy with Henry James combines his vivid letters home from Italy with a selection of his most heartfelt and eloquent essays about the cities and rural areas he visited between 1869 and 1907. First arriving in Italy a year before it was united as a secular state, James was a firsthand observer of Italy's national adolescence and early adulthood. His letters bear witness to his spontaneous responses to the dramatic geography and the extroverted people, which were a refreshing contrast to the rainy climate and reserved Victorians he was accustomed to. In the essays James delves more deeply into his Italian experience. Unlike other collections of Henry James's Italian travel writing, Kaplan's anthology has been arranged geographically: He compiles for readers and tourists a literary map of James's Italy. This small, portable volume is the ideal companion for any explorer of Italy, and for the armchair tourist, Kaplan's collection provides a city-by-city tour of Florence, Venice, Rome, and the breathtaking countryside in between. In James's prose writings on Italy, readers will find the sensuous, passionate, human side of one of the most inspired writers in the English language.
Baron Charles von Hugel was an Austrian diplomat, army officer and courtier, and was celebrated across Europe, during the mid-nineteenth century, for his magnificent gardens and his cultivation of exotic plants, including the fashionable 'New Holland plants'. In 1831 he set out from Europe on six years of travel to mend his broken heart. His betrothed, the Hungarian Countess Melanie Zichy-Ferraris had broken their engagement and become the third Princess Metternich. In the course of several years of travelling the world, he spent most of 1834 in the young Australian colonies of Swan River, Van Diemen's Land, Norfolk Island and New South Wales, observing the flora and collecting the seeds for his gardens. This is Hugel's journal of his travels on this continent. Translated into English for the first time and previously unpublished, it is an insightful record of the flora he found here and the people he met, interspersed with acute and generally unflattering commentaries on British administration, the transportation system, Sydney social life, missionary efforts, and the treatment of Aborigines. Apart from the romantic melancholy which occasionally colours Hugel's journal, his account of the colonies is unique, because he saw them from a perspective quite unlike that of most observers of the time. He was an Austrian aristocrat, a devout Catholic, a passionate supporter of the reactionary Hapsburg Empire and an intimate of the all-powerful Prince Metternich - no friend of the new 'democracies'. He hobnobbed with all the notables wherever he went, but also had many encounters - often described in comic dialogue - with convicts and ex-convicts, bushrangers, shanty-keepers, and common folk. An indefatigable traveller, on horseback and on foot, he also drove a gig over the primitive road over the Blue Mountains, and far and wide in the interior. Back in Europe, Hugel's descriptions of the vegetation of this 'great southern land mass' were to inspire Ferdinand von Mueller, later to become director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens. Hugel's botanical influence is still evident also in a number of Australian plant names, such as Acacia huegelii and Hardenbergia, which was named after his sister, Countess von Hardenberg.
