Travels Through Time in Italy: Eight Cities Past and Present

Long before Thomas Cook made mass tourism to Italy possible in the 1860s there was the Grand Tour which, believe it or not, goes back a couple of centuries before that. Seen as a sort of educational finishing school for aristocrats, the Tour took in the Classical and Renaissance sights of Italy, finishing up in Naples and Pompeii.

Now, on a package tour, along comes David M. Addison accompanied by his wife, aka La Belle Dame Sans Merci, who thinks he could do with a bit of polishing up as they take in the cultural hotspots of Naples, Pompeii, Assisi, Florence, Pisa, Siena, Rome and the Vatican.

The sweep of this book takes the reader from Roman times to the Renaissance, from emperors to kings - including the artists and architects, the politicians and popes, the saints and sinners - all of whom exercised a major influence on their times. With an eye for the off-beat and the extraordinary, this is a personal account of what most impressed the author on his latter-day educational Tour.

Seamlessly interwoven with the Italy of the past, is the author's take on present-day Italy. In a humorous, self-deprecatory style, he describes life as he sees it, the curious incidents he witnesses, the interesting people he meets, including his travelling companions. He makes no secret of the scrapes he gets into which arise out of his own eccentricities, nor the occasions when he causes embarrassment of the most cringe-making kind to his long-suffering wife.

Much more serious however, was the time when, all alone, the author found himself accosted in the street by three menacing-looking men demanding his passport...

A native of Banff, Scotland, David M. Addison is a graduate of Aberdeen University. As well as essays in various publications, he has written several books, mainly about his travels. As well as a short spell teaching English as a foreign language in Poland when the Solidarity movement was at its height, he spent a year (1978-79) as an exchange teacher in Montana. He regards his decision to apply for the exchange as one of the best things he ever did, for not only did it give him the chance to travel extensively in the US and Canada but during the course of the year he made a number of enduring friendships. His award-winning An Innocent Abroad is the first in a planned trilogy about this extraordinary year while the second, Still Innocent Abroad, was published in 2016. Since taking early retirement (he is not as old as he looks), he has more time but less money to indulge his unquenchable thirst for travel (and his wife would say for Cabernet Sauvignon and malt whisky). He is doing his best to spend the children's inheritance by travelling as far and wide and as often as he can. In 2015 An Innocent Abroad received an award in the Bookbzz Prize Writer Competition for Biography and Memoir. David's most recent travels took him to the Highlands of Scotland, exploring Visit Scotland's recently unveiled NC500, dubbed "Scotland's Route 66", and rated one of the top five most scenic road journeys in the world. For more details about David and his work, please visit his website at www.davidmaddison.org.