Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (John Murray Travel Classics)

by PatrickLeighFermor (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $5.46

  The author observes: All of Greece is absorbing and rewarding. There is hardly a rock or stream without a battle or myth or miracle or a peasant anecdote or a superstition; and talk and incident, nearly all of it odd or memorable, thicken round the traveller's path at every step. In 'Mani', one of the two best travel books of the century , Patrick Leigh Fermor fully bears this out. His glorious fusion of scholarship, history and imagination is a joy to read.

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $4.17

• New

  paperback
  

  $12.09

  This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.

  Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta - is one that maintains perhaps a stronger relationship with the ancient past than with the present. Myth becomes history, and vice versa.

  Leigh Fermor's hallmark descriptive writing and capture of unexpected detail have made this book, first published in 1958, a classic - together with its Northern Greece counterpart, Roumeli.