Continental Drifter: Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist

Continental Drifter: Taking the Low Road with the First Grand Tourist

by TimMoore (Author)

Synopsis

They stuck their coaches on ride-on, ride off ferries, whisked through France and Italy moaning about garlic and rudeness, then bored the neighbours to death by having them all round to look at their holiday watercolours . Most people associate the Grand Tour with the baggy shirted Byrons of its 19th-century heyday, but someone had to do it first and Thomas Coryate, author of arguably the first piece of pure travel writing, Crudities , was that man. Tim Moore travels through 45 cities in the steps of a larger-than-life Jacobean hero incidentally responsible for introducing forks to England and thus ending forever the days of the finger-lickin'-good drumstick hurlers of courts gone by. Coryate's early 17th-century bawdy anecdotes include being pelted with eggs, pursued by a knife-wielding man in a turban and, finally, being vomited on copiously by a topless woman with a beer barrel on her head. Tim Moore has no trouble keeping up the modern-day side. And his authentic method of travel to replicate these adventures? A clapped-out Rolls Royce, of course.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 22 Feb 2001

ISBN 10: 0349114641
ISBN 13: 9780349114644