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Exploring Literary Tours: A Comprehensive Guide

Welcome to our in-depth exploration of literary tours, a unique and enriching travel experience that allows book lovers and literary enthusiasts to immerse themselves in the world of their favorite authors and stories. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the concept of literary tours, their history, types, popular destinations, and tips for planning a memorable literary journey.

What is a Literary Tour?

A literary tour is a specialized form of travel that focuses on exploring the settings, landmarks, and inspirations behind famous literary works and the lives of renowned authors. It offers participants the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of their favorite writers, visit the places that inspired their stories, and gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical context in which the works were created.

Whether it's retracing the steps of Sherlock Holmes in London, exploring the landscapes that inspired the novels of Jane Austen in England's countryside, or visiting the haunts of Ernest Hemingway in Paris, literary tours provide a unique and immersive way to connect with literature and its creators.

The History of Literary Tours

The concept of literary tours can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries when travelers began to seek out the settings and landmarks described in popular works of literature. The Romantic poets, such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, were among the first to inspire literary pilgrimages to the landscapes that influenced their poetry.

With the rise of the novel as a popular form of literature in the 19th century, authors like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy became associated with specific locations in London and rural England, attracting readers and fans eager to explore the places depicted in their novels.

In the modern era, literary tourism has grown in popularity, with travelers from around the world embarking on literary tours to destinations ranging from the streets of Dublin that James Joyce immortalized in "Ulysses" to the mystical landscapes of New Zealand featured in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."

Types of Literary Tours

There are various types of literary tours catering to different interests and preferences of travelers. Some of the common types include:

• Author-Centric Tours: These tours focus on the life and works of a specific author, taking participants to the places where the author lived, wrote, and found inspiration.
• Book-Inspired Tours: These tours are centered around a particular book or series of books, allowing travelers to visit the locations described in the story and learn about the background and context of the work.
• Historical Literary Tours: These tours combine elements of history and literature, exploring the connections between famous authors and the historical events and figures of their time.
• Themed Literary Tours: These tours revolve around a specific theme or genre, such as mystery novels, science fiction, or romance, offering a tailored experience for fans of particular literary genres.

Popular Literary Tour Destinations

From bustling cities to remote landscapes, literary tours can take you to a wide range of destinations that have inspired authors and captured the imagination of readers. Some of the most popular literary tour destinations around the world include:

• London, England: Explore the literary landmarks of London, including the British Library, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, and the haunts of Charles Dickens in the Victorian streets of the city.
• Edinburgh, Scotland: Walk in the footsteps of J.K. Rowling and visit the cafes and alleys that inspired the magical world of Harry Potter in the historic city of Edinburgh.
• Paris, France: Discover the literary legacy of Paris with visits to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the cafes of the Left Bank frequented by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the iconic landmarks featured in the works of Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust.
• Concord, Massachusetts, USA: Immerse yourself in the transcendentalist movement with a visit to the homes of Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in the picturesque town of Concord.
• Dublin, Ireland: Experience the literary heritage of Dublin with a tour of the Dublin Writers Museum, a visit to the haunts of James Joyce in the city, and a stroll through the streets immortalized in the works of Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats.

Tips for Planning a Memorable Literary Tour

Planning a literary tour requires careful consideration of the destinations, themes, and logistics involved in the journey. Here are some tips to help you plan a memorable literary tour:

• Research Your Favorite Authors: Start by researching the authors and books that interest you the most to identify the locations and landmarks associated with their works.
• Create an Itinerary: Develop a detailed itinerary that includes the places you want to visit, the activities you want to do, and the experiences you want to have during the tour.
• Book Accommodations in Advance: Secure accommodations in hotels, B&Bs, or guesthouses that are conveniently located near the literary sites you plan to visit.
• Join a Guided Tour: Consider joining a guided literary tour led by experts who can provide insights into the history, culture, and literature of the destinations you are exploring.
• Immerse Yourself in the Local Culture: Take the time to immerse yourself in the local culture, cuisine, and traditions of the places you visit to enhance your literary tour experience.

With these tips in mind, you are ready to embark on a literary tour that will transport you to the worlds of your favorite authors and stories, offering a unique and enriching travel experience that combines the love of literature with the thrill of exploration.

Happy travels!

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What Is Literary Tourism?

Literary tourism is the practice of visiting cities and sites related to works of fiction and their authors. Combining literature with travel and cultural experiences, literary tourism is by no means a recent occurrence and has been practiced for several centuries. The use of electronic devices for participating in the literary tourism experience has become popular and has added some new twists to this form of tourism.

An interest in traveling to places associated with poets and novelists grew in the 19th century, when according to historical accounts, curious travelers began visiting the homes, graves and favorite haunts of famous writers. Travelers also visited the sites and cities described in famous poems and novels. During this time, Stratford, England was memorialized for Shakespeare, while Abbotsford, England, was venerated for Sir Walter Scott. The Bronte sisters were remembered for their home at Haworth, England.

Crossing the boundaries between literature and cultural studies, literary tourism invites readers to make fictional experiences come alive. Literary tourism enables travelers to immerse themselves in the local culture, while increasing their knowledge about authors and literature. To cater to the tastes of this specialized group of travelers, many cities have taken advantage of this phenomenon by creating walking and cycling tours of famous writers' homes, the places where they wrote, and taverns they may have visited.

For example, London , England, has tours that honor Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Homes . One tour includes a house dedicated to fictional characters from the novel. In Ireland, a Dublin Literary Pub Crawl invites tourists to walk in the shoes of writers like James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and W.B. Yeats. The walking tour is guided by actors, and guests are invited to participate in a literary quiz with prizes.

The development of electronic devices for reading books has sparked new innovations in literary tourism, with authors writing novels that offer readers the option of a virtual travel experience or a new way to enjoy a travel destination. Travel guides in some of these novels allow the reader to visit sites remotely or gather information for a vacation. Some electronic literary tourism novels encourage the readers to visit a city by involving them in a game in which points are given for visiting different locations. An example is a novel by the Japanese author Higashi Moriyama, who has partnered with the city of Kyota, Japan, to draw tourists to the city.

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What You Should Know About Travel Writing

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction in which the narrator's encounters with foreign places serve as the dominant subject. Also called  travel literature .

"All travel writing—because it is writing—is made in the sense of being constructed, says Peter Hulme, "but travel writing cannot be made up without losing its designation" (quoted by Tim Youngs in  The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing , 2013).

Notable contemporary travel writers in English include Paul Theroux, Susan Orlean, Bill Bryson , Pico Iyer, Rory MacLean, Mary Morris, Dennison Berwick, Jan Morris, Tony Horwitz, Jeffrey Tayler, and Tom Miller, among countless others.

Examples of Travel Writing

• "By the Railway Side" by Alice Meynell
• Lists and Anaphora in Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There"
• Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
• "London From a Distance" by Ford Madox Ford
• "Niagara Falls" by Rupert Brooke
• "Nights in London" by Thomas Burke
• "Of Trave," by Francis Bacon
• "Of Travel" by Owen Felltham
• "Rochester" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Observations About Travel Writing

Authors, journalists, and others have attempted to describe travel writing, which is more difficult to do than you might think. However, these excerpts explain that travel writing—at a minimum—requires a sense of curiosity, awareness, and fun.

Thomas Swick

• "The best writers in the field [of travel writing] bring to it an indefatigable curiosity, a fierce intelligence that enables them to interpret, and a generous heart that allows them to connect. Without resorting to invention , they make ample use of their imaginations. . . . "The travel book itself has a similar grab bag quality. It incorporates the characters and plot line of a novel, the descriptive power of poetry, the substance of a history lesson, the discursiveness of an essay , and the—often inadvertent—self-revelation of a memoir . It revels in the particular while occasionally illuminating the universal. It colors and shapes and fills in gaps. Because it results from displacement, it is frequently funny. It takes readers for a spin (and shows them, usually, how lucky they are). It humanizes the alien. More often than not it celebrates the unsung. It uncovers truths that are stranger than fiction. It gives eyewitness proof of life’s infinite possibilities." ("Not a Tourist." The Wilson Quarterly , Winter 2010)

Casey Blanton

• "There exists at the center of travel books like [Graham] Greene's Journey Without Maps or [V.S.] Naipaul's An Area of Darkness a mediating consciousness that monitors the journey, judges, thinks, confesses, changes, and even grows. This narrator , so central to what we have come to expect in modern travel writing , is a relatively new ingredient in travel literature, but it is one that irrevocably changed the genre . . . . "Freed from strictly chronological , fact-driven narratives , nearly all contemporary travel writers include their own dreams and memories of childhood as well as chunks of historical data and synopses of other travel books. Self reflexivity and instability, both as theme and style , offer the writer a way to show the effects of his or her own presence in a foreign country and to expose the arbitrariness of truth and the absence of norms." ( Travel Writing: The Self and the World . Routledge, 2002)

Frances Mayes

• "Some travel writers can become serious to the point of lapsing into good ol' American puritanism. . . . What nonsense! I have traveled much in Concord. Good travel writing can be as much about having a good time as about eating grubs and chasing drug lords. . . . [T]ravel is for learning, for fun, for escape, for personal quests, for challenge, for exploration, for opening the imagination to other lives and languages." (Introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2002 . Houghton, 2002)

Travel Writers on Travel Writing

In the past, travel writing was considered to be nothing more than the detailing of specific routes to various destinations. Today, however, travel writing has become much more. Read on to find out what famous travel writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux say about the profession.

V.S. Naipaul

• "My books have to be called ' travel writing ,' but that can be misleading because in the old days travel writing was essentially done by men describing the routes they were taking. . . . What I do is quite different. I travel on a theme . I travel to make an inquiry. I am not a journalist. I am taking with me the gifts of sympathy, observation, and curiosity that I developed as an imaginative writer. The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives." (Interview with Ahmed Rashid, "Death of the Novel." The Observer , Feb. 25, 1996)

Paul Theroux

• - "Most travel narratives—perhaps all of them, the classics anyway—describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road is the story; the journey, not the arrival, matters, and most of the time the traveler—the traveler’s mood, especially—is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and self-portraiture, travel writing as diffused autobiography ; and so have many others in the old, laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing ." (Paul Theroux, "The Soul of the South." Smithsonian Magazine , July-August 2014) - "Most visitors to coastal Maine know it in the summer. In the nature of visitation, people show up in the season. The snow and ice are a bleak memory now on the long warm days of early summer, but it seems to me that to understand a place best, the visitor needs to see figures in a landscape in all seasons. Maine is a joy in the summer. But the soul of Maine is more apparent in the winter. You see that the population is actually quite small, the roads are empty, some of the restaurants are closed, the houses of the summer people are dark, their driveways unplowed. But Maine out of season is unmistakably a great destination: hospitable, good-humored, plenty of elbow room, short days, dark nights of crackling ice crystals. "Winter is a season of recovery and preparation. Boats are repaired, traps fixed, nets mended. “I need the winter to rest my body,” my friend the lobsterman told me, speaking of how he suspended his lobstering in December and did not resume until April. . . ." ("The Wicked Coast." The Atlantic , June 2011)

Susan Orlean

• - "To be honest, I view all stories as journeys. Journeys are the essential text of the human experience—the journey from birth to death, from innocence to wisdom, from ignorance to knowledge, from where we start to where we end. There is almost no piece of important writing—the Bible, the Odyssey , Chaucer, Ulysses —that isn't explicitly or implicitly the story of a journey. Even when I don't actually go anywhere for a particular story, the way I report is to immerse myself in something I usually know very little about, and what I experience is the journey toward a grasp of what I've seen." (Susan Orlean, Introduction to My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere . Random House, 2004) - "When I went to Scotland for a friend's wedding last summer, I didn't plan on firing a gun. Getting into a fistfight, maybe; hurling insults about badly dressed bridesmaids, of course; but I didn't expect to shoot or get shot at. The wedding was taking place in a medieval castle in a speck of a village called Biggar. There was not a lot to do in Biggar, but the caretaker of the castle had skeet-shooting gear, and the male guests announced that before the rehearsal dinner they were going to give it a go. The women were advised to knit or shop or something. I don't know if any of us women actually wanted to join them, but we didn't want to be left out, so we insisted on coming along. . . ." (Opening paragraph of "Shooting Party." The New Yorker , September 29, 1999)

Jonathan Raban

• - "As a literary form, travel writing is a notoriously raffish open house where different genres are likely to end up in the bed. It accommodates the private diary , the essay , the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing." ( For Love & Money: Writing - Reading - Travelling 1968-1987 . Picador, 1988)
• - "Travel in its purest form requires no certain destination, no fixed itinerary, no advance reservation and no return ticket, for you are trying to launch yourself onto the haphazard drift of things, and put yourself in the way of whatever changes the journey may throw up. It's when you miss the one flight of the week, when the expected friend fails to show, when the pre-booked hotel reveals itself as a collection of steel joists stuck into a ravaged hillside, when a stranger asks you to share the cost of a hired car to a town whose name you've never heard, that you begin to travel in earnest." ("Why Travel?" Driving Home: An American Journey . Pantheon, 2011)
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Beginner’s Guide to Literary Travel

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Whether it’s a real location or fictional, reading can transport you anywhere you could possibly want to go. Recently a new form of travel has emerged where readers explore the real world to either see literary works come to life, or to complement their bookish passions.

Literary travel can be as simple as visiting places mentioned in novels or tracking down famous author haunts. But it’s also about immersing yourself in the literary fabric of a destination, uncovering the stories that have shaped its culture and identity. 

Whether you’re strolling through the streets of Tokyo with Haruki Murakami , traversing the rugged moors of England with Emily Brontë, learning about aspects of Russian literature, or simply hopping between Seoul’s bookstores , literary travel offers a unique way to connect with both literature and the world around you.

After studying literature in college I went on to get my MFA in Creative Writing where each semester we spent time in a different city to explore the local literary traditions and culture. That combined with my travels to over 65 countries, I’ve seen and experienced some amazing things around the world and got a great insight into the literary traditions in countries like Kenya, Australia, Japan , Russia, and the UK . 

My beginner’s guide to literary travel will help anyone with a passion for books, reading, or writing to head out and experience hidden literary gems scattered across the globe.

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What is Literary Travel?

Bookish or literary travel is a phenomenon that has taken the world by storm, captivating literature enthusiasts and wanderlust seekers alike. Combining the love for reading with a passion for exploring new destinations , bookish travel offers a unique way to delve into the worlds created by beloved authors. 

From visiting iconic literary landmarks to attending book festivals and immersing oneself in themed tours, this form of tourism allows bibliophiles to step inside the pages of their favorite books and experience firsthand the settings that have inspired countless stories. 

Whether it’s following in the footsteps of Jane Austen through picturesque English villages or tracing the path of Gabriel García Márquez in vibrant Colombian towns, bookish travel opens up endless opportunities for literary pilgrimages around the globe. So grab your passport and embark on an adventure where fiction meets reality, as we delve into what exactly entails this fascinating niche of travel known as bookish travel.

Top Literary Travel Destinations

While I firmly believe every destination can be great for literary travel, there are no doubt places in the world that are more fit for book lovers . Whether they’re the hometowns of famous writers, famous cities featured in literature, nations with a particularly rich literary heritage, or places with a high concentration of bookstores and literary events, there are many places around the world that make for great literary travel destinations that book lovers should visit.

Also check out my complete list of literary travel destinations.

Edinburgh has been a beacon for literary enthusiasts worldwide, captivating visitors with its rich literary heritage and vibrant culture. In fact, it was the world’s first UNESCO City of Literature making it a great place for book lovers .  

From the haunting tales of Robert Louis Stevenson to the spellbinding narratives of J.K. Rowling, the city’s cobbled streets and historic landmarks inspire endless exploration. 

The Edinburgh International Book Festival draws renowned authors and avid readers alike, fostering a dynamic literary community. Visitors can wander through the atmospheric closes of the Old Town with its abundance of bookstores , visit the Writers’ Museum to learn about local authors, visit literary sites like the Scott Monument, or see the places connected to the Harry Potter series . 

Edinburgh’s allure as a literary travel destination is as timeless as the stories it has inspired.

Read Also: Literary Travel Guide to Edinburgh

Aside from Edinburgh, London reigns as a premier literary travel destination , boasting a rich tapestry of literary history woven into its very fabric. From the iconic settings of Charles Dickens’ novels to the timeless allure of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the city is a living testament to the power of words. 

Literary travelers can stroll through Bloomsbury, home to the Bloomsbury Group, or visit the British Library, housing treasures like the Magna Carta and original manuscripts. 

Bookshops like Daunt Books and Hatchards beckon with their charm. London’s literary festivals, Harry Potter sites , and mention in countless novels make it a top site for literary trips.

Read Also: Literary Travel Guide to London

New York is a literary mecca, drawing bibliophiles from around the globe to its bustling streets and storied landmarks to celebrate its place in American literature. From the iconic settings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” to the bohemian haunts of the Beat Generation, the city pulses with literary history. 

Visitors can wander through the hallowed halls of the New York Public Library, stroll along the literary haven of Book Row, or attend readings at iconic venues like The Strand Bookstore, one of the best bookstores in the world . With its diverse neighborhoods, vibrant arts scene, and endless literary events, New York offers an immersive journey into the world of words.

If you’re up for it, try one of the literary road trips from New York to places like Massachusetts, Maine, or upstate New York for literary tours Walden Pond, Salem (one of the best places to visit for Halloween ), or to see Stephen King’s house.

Paris, the City of Light, shines brightly as a top literary travel destination, enchanting visitors with its romantic streets and rich literary heritage. From the existential musings of Jean-Paul Sartre to the poetic verses of Charles Baudelaire, Paris has inspired generations of writers and artists. 

Literary landmarks can be found on almost every corner, from the iconic Shakespeare and Company bookstore to the historic cafés frequented by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Strolling along the Seine, visitors can’t help but feel the echoes of literary greatness that permeate the city. With its timeless allure and cultural sophistication, Paris remains a beacon for book lovers seeking inspiration and adventure.

While the literary cities I’ve mentioned so far are probably common knowledge, Iceland may come as a surprise to some. But as another UNESCO City of Literature, Reykjavik is a captivating literary travel destination. 

From the ancient Icelandic sagas to the literary holiday tradition of Jólabókaflóð (the Yule Book Flood), the country boasts a literary tradition as vast and awe-inspiring as its volcanic landscapes. 

Bookish travelers can explore the literary history of Reykjavik at some of the city’s amazing bookstores , the Reykjavik City Library, or delve into the country’s folklore at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. 

With its mystical landscapes and deep-rooted storytelling tradition, Iceland offers a truly immersive experience for literary enthusiasts seeking inspiration in its otherworldly beauty.

Tokyo is also another dynamic literary travel destination, blending modernity with tradition to create a captivating backdrop for literary exploration. From the vivid narratives of Haruki Murakami to the timeless haiku of Matsuo Bashō, Tokyo’s literary scene is as diverse as its bustling streets. 

Visitors can peruse the shelves of iconic bookstores like Tsutaya Books or immerse themselves in the city’s rich literary history at the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library. With its juxtaposition of ancient temples and neon-lit skyscrapers, Tokyo offers a unique cultural tapestry that inspires writers and readers alike, making it a top destination for literary discovery and adventure.

Another UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin is an unparalleled literary travel destination, steeped in a rich tradition of storytelling and literary greatness. From the timeless works of James Joyce to the poignant poetry of W.B. Yeats, the city’s cobblestone streets echo with the voices of literary giants. 

Literary travelers can explore the iconic Trinity College Library, home to the ancient Book of Kells, or stroll through the historic Dublin Writers Museum. The city’s vibrant pub culture provides the perfect backdrop for literary discussions and readings. With its deep-rooted literary heritage, Dublin offers an immersive journey into the heart of Irish literature, making it a must-visit destination for book lovers.

St. Petersburg

Possibly another unexpected literary destination is St. Petersburg. From the evocative prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky to the romantic poetry of Alexander Pushkin, the city has inspired generations of writers and poets. 

Visitors can wander along the embankments of the Neva River, immersing themselves in the same landscapes that inspired the iconic scenes of Russian literature. The city’s opulent palaces and grand avenues provide a majestic backdrop for literary exploration, offering a glimpse into the soul of Russia’s literary heritage and making St. Petersburg an unforgettable destination for book enthusiasts.

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Guide to Literary Travel Activities and Experiences 

Whether you’re visiting one of the top literary cities in the world or just trying to add in some bookish experiences to your trip, here are some ideas for literary activities and experiences that you can seek out. 

Explore Literary Sites 

One of the best ways to enjoy a literary trip is to visit literary sites. This could be visiting author’s homes , museums , gravesites , locations mentioned in novels , or places that inspired some of your favorite works.  Some top ideas include:

• Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, London, UK
• The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, UK
• The Hemingway Home and Museum, Key West, Florida, USA 
• The Writer’s Museum, Edinburgh, UK
• Oscar Wilde’s Grave , Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France
• Mark Twain’s Grave, Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York
• Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grave, Tikhvin Cemetery, Saint Petersburg, Russia
• Chateau d’If, France- Setting for The Count of Monte Cristo
• Bran Castle, Romania- Inspiration for Dracula’s Castle
• North York Moors- Inspiration for the Secret Garden
• 221B Baker Street -location and museum for Sherlock Holmes

This list is by no means conclusive. You can find museums, book settings, or author-related places almost anywhere on earth. If you find one, I recommend taking a tour to gain a deeper understanding of the author’s life, the reason the place inspired a book setting, or more information about the exhibits. 

Recommended Book-Themed Tours 

• Literary Pub Crawl , Dublin, Ireland: Explore Dublin’s rich literary history while visiting famous pubs frequented by James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and other iconic writers.
• Harry Potter Walking Tour , Edinburgh, Scotland, UK: Follow in the footsteps of J.K. Rowling and her magical world of Harry Potter, visiting locations that inspired the books and films.
• Charles Dickens Walking Tour, London, UK: Discover the streets and alleys of Victorian London that inspired Charles Dickens’ novels, including “Oliver Twist” and “David Copperfield.”
• Hemingway Tour, Paris, France: Explore the Parisian haunts of Ernest Hemingway, including cafes, bars, and literary landmarks featured in his memoir “A Moveable Feast.”
• Edinburgh Literary Pub Crawl : explore Dublin’s literary heritage while experiencing the city’s traditional pubs.
• Barcelona Literary Tour : visit sites around Barcelona relevant to authors, novels, and the history of the city.
• Brooklyn Literary Pub Crawl : explore the literary side of Brooklyn with stops in Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill, and Boerum Hill.
• Self-guided Literature Tour , Buenos Aires: self-guided tour of some of Beunos Aires’ literary gems including El Ateneo Grand Splendid and locations connected with Jorge Luis Borges.

Browse Bookstores and Libraries

The most basic literary travel experience is to visit bookstores or libraries wherever you happen to be. From world famous bookstores like Livraria Lello and El Ateneo Grand Splendid, to small independent shops in cities like Buffalo , Las Vegas , and Park City , there’s luckily no storage of shops you can browse anywhere you happen to be. 

Here’s a list of some of the top bookstores in the world:

• Shakespeare and Company, Paris
• Powell’s City of Books, Portland
• Libreria Acqua Alta, Venice
• Starfield Library, Seoul
• Hatchard’s, London
• Strand Bookstore, New York
• Boekhandel Dominicanen, Maastricht

For more, read my post on the best bookstores in the world .

Attend Literary Events and Festivals

Literary events and festivals can be found in almost every corner of the world. To help immerse yourself in the literary world, here are some top events around the world.

• Hay Festival – Hay-on-Wye, Wales, UK : One of the most prestigious literary festivals, featuring discussions, readings, and performances by prominent authors from around the world.
• Edinburgh International Book Festival – Edinburgh, Scotland, UK: A major literary event hosting a diverse range of authors, poets, and speakers in Scotland’s capital city.
• Jaipur Literature Festival – Jaipur, India: Known as the “greatest literary show on Earth,” this festival attracts leading authors, thinkers, and cultural icons from India and beyond.
• Berlin International Literature Festival – Berlin, Germany: A major literary event showcasing contemporary literature from around the world through readings, discussions, and performances.
• The Toronto International Festival of Authors – Toronto, Canada: A renowned literary festival featuring author readings, panel discussions, and book signings in one of Canada’s cultural hubs.
• The Brooklyn Book Festival – Brooklyn, New York, USA: A major literary event celebrating the vibrant literary culture of Brooklyn and featuring author readings, panel discussions, and book signings.

How to Plan a Literary Trip

If you’re looking to plan a bookish trip, you already know some amazing locations, activities, and tours to try. But don’t just follow my advice on trips I’ve taken (though you’re free to copy my trips all you want). Planning your own specific trip will make for an even more special time as it’s catered to your personal taste and interest. 

Here are some tips on planning your own literary trip.

Choose a Destination Based on Favorite Authors or Books

• Start by identifying your favorite authors, books, or literary genres.
• Research destinations associated with these authors or books, considering cities, countries, or regions where they lived, wrote, or set their stories.
• Consider factors such as historical significance, cultural relevance, and personal interest to narrow down your options.

Research Literary Sites and Landmarks in the Area

• Utilize resources such as books, travel guides, websites, and blogs (hello!) to identify literary sites and landmarks in your chosen destination.
• Look for author’s homes, museums, libraries, bookstores, cafes, and landmarks mentioned in their works.
• Make note of any guided tours, literary festivals, or events taking place during your visit.

Create an Itinerary with a Mix of Literary and Traditional Tourist Attractions

• Plan a balanced itinerary that includes both literary attractions and traditional tourist spots.
• Prioritize visits to key literary sites while allowing time for leisurely exploration and relaxation.
• Include activities such as author-themed walking tours, book signings, readings, or visits to iconic bookstores and libraries.
• Mix in visits to local landmarks, museums, art galleries, parks, restaurants, and cultural events to experience the destination’s overall ambiance and attractions.
• Consider scheduling free time for spontaneous discoveries, shopping for books, or enjoying local cuisine.
• Check opening hours, admission fees, and any reservation requirements for specific attractions in advance to ensure a smooth and enjoyable trip.

By following these steps, you can plan a literary trip that combines your passion for literature with the exploration of new destinations and cultural experiences.

Bookish Packing Essentials

When packing for a literary trip, consider bringing the following essentials to enhance your experience:

Books: Pack your favorite novels, poetry collections, or travel guides related to your destination or favorite authors. Consider an e-reader like a kindle to read e-books or audiobooks for convenience.

Journa l and Pen : Bring a notebook or journal to jot down thoughts, reflections, and literary inspirations during your travels. Don’t forget a reliable pen!

Maps and Guides : Carry maps, guidebooks, or smartphone apps featuring literary landmarks, walking tours, and local bookstores.

Reading Accessories: Pack reading accessories such as bookmarks , reading glasses, or a book light for comfortable reading in various settings.

Literary Apparel : Show your literary love with apparel featuring quotes, book covers, or characters from your favorite authors or books.

Camera or Smartphone : Capture memories of literary sites, bookstores, and landmarks with a camera or smartphone to document your journey.

Portable Charger : Keep your devices charged with a portable charger to ensure uninterrupted access to e-books, maps, and travel apps.

Reusable Tote Bag : Bring a foldable tote bag for carrying books, souvenirs, or literary purchases from local bookshops.

Travel-sized Bookmarks or Bookplates: Bring travel-sized bookmarks or bookplates to personalize books you purchase or borrow during your trip.

Literary Souvenirs: Consider collecting literary souvenirs such as postcards, bookmarks, or book-themed mementos to commemorate your travels.

By packing these essentials, you’ll be well-prepared to immerse yourself in the world of literature while exploring new destinations and experiencing the magic of literary travel.

And there’s my literary travel guide for beginner’s. For readers that want to explore the world through books, hopefully I’ve given you some ideas on how you can add a bookish flair to your travels or make literary travel a priority. 

Whether you want to explore locations once inhabited by famous writers, browse a unique bookstore, or learn more about a country’s literary heritage, there is a literary travel style for everyone. 

If you’re interested in learning more about literary travel, be sure to check around my site. From bookstores to peruse , coffee shops to read in , or complete literary guides , I have something for every literary traveler.

Are you ready to Travel?

• Book Your Flights – To find the cheapest flights, flexibility is a must. Some great options are Google Flights for the calendars to find the cheapest options, Skiplagged , and Skyscanner . For more options, see our resources page .
• Find Transportation- If you’re driving, look into Rentalcars.com before arriving to find the best rates. Also check for rail or bus routes as they might be cheaper than renting a car.
• Book Your Accommodation – Look at Booking.com , Hotels.com , or Expedia for hotels. You can also look at AirBnB or VRBO if you want a bigger space.
• Book Tours and Experiences- Check Viator or Klook for some of the best tours and attractions for a great price.
• Stay Connected – If your phone’s data plan is going to be expensive, order an e SIM card before you go.
• Buy Travel Insurance- I always recommend World Nomads for insurance. It’s better to protect yourself in case of mishaps. Learn more about World Nomads in this FAQ post.
• Pack Your Bags – Check out my packing lists , or my favorite travel gear to help you remember all of the essentials.
• Learn About Your Destination: Learn about your location with guidebooks like Lonely Planet , or, novels and books about the country, or, shameless plug , search around my site for more info.

Hey, I’m Mackenzie, a writer, book lover, and traveler. I've been to 65 countries and have found the best bookstores, coffee shops, and literary activities around the world. I have 10 years of travel writing experience, writing for my own sites and for other large brands. When not writing, I'm probably running or hiking, reading, or watching British TV. Like this article? Consider buying me a coffee to help keep the posts coming.

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Plan Your Own Amazing Literary Trips

Libreria Acqua Alta Bookstore, Venice, Italy | Photo by Clay Banks

If you are wondering how to plan your own literary trips, you are in the right place! It is no secret to fellow bookworms who love to travel– literary holidays are some of the best.

A tourist passing through a destination to see the sights does not get nearly as much out of the trip as the traveler who takes the time to understand the culture they have entered at that destination. One way to do this is through literature travel.

Read stories written by local authors and search out locations related to those stories when you visit. By familiarizing yourself with their stories, you’ll have something to discuss with locals you meet. And by searching out locations related to those stories, and places of literature in general, you’ll often find yourself off the beaten tourist track wandering along streets you otherwise wouldn’t have seen. 

As a former librarian and lifelong bookworm, I often plan literary vacations inspired by the books I read, which I share on the blog and booktube channel (on YouTube), A Suitcase Full of Books . After several literary-based trips, I’ve discovered that while I often set out with the goal of just seeing the setting that inspired a novel, it’s the local community of people that makes the biggest impression on the overall trip. 

Table of Contents

Top Tips for Your Own Literary Travel

1. find a book that is related to your destination.

The first thing I do when planning a trip is search for a book that takes place in my desired literary travel destination (if a book hasn’t already been the inspiration for the trip).

To find a book I use sites like:

• The Book Trail

Once I find a promising book, I do some research to determine the author’s connection to the location . Were they born and raised there, like L. M. Montgomery in Prince Edward Island (author of Anne of Green Gables )? Did they just live there temporarily, like Jack London in the Yukon (author of The Call of the Wild )? Or were they perhaps trying to colonize the locals, like George Orwell in Burma/Myanmar (author of Burmese Days )?

The author’s connection may color their representation of the place and people. I suggest trying to find a book by a local author first; however, an outside author who has written about a place during a time of historical significance can be fun too. Then you can spend your trip noting the differences between then and now, as I did in the vlog Myanmar in the Footsteps of George Orwell .

2. Find Literary Places to Visit

After deciding on my travel to-be-read list, I start researching places to visit and stay at my destination that are related to my chosen book(s) or just literature in general. I use search engines (like Google, YouTube, Pinterest) to find out if there are any historic authors’ homes available to visit, or if there are any accommodations in the area themed for the hometown author or their book(s).

I also research bookstores and libraries in the area to see if any of them have anything that particularly stands out as interesting to visit on the literary journey. 

As internet research often takes time and requires piecing information together from several different sources, I also use literary travel guidebooks to do my research. Here are two of my favorites for planning literary trips:

3. Join a Literary Tour

Literary tourism is growing so many destinations offer highly engaging literary tours that you can include in your trip. You might visit homes, universities, pubs, cemeteries and more. Many are led by skilled reenactors in costume. If you are a serious fan, you might want to go in costume yourself! Check out some of these and look for those specific to your destination.

4. Plan Your Literary Trips

Now you are ready to plan your itinerary . Once you’ve come up with a list of locations to visit at your destination, I suggest planning ahead of time when you’ll visit each one. I’ve found through experience that small house museums and other historic/literature-inspired sites often have odd open hours, and each one will have a different ticketing/touring process. 

My Literary Travel

Plan the perfect anne of green gables vacation.

In case you’re wondering, the community living on Prince Edward Island, Canada is exactly as warm and welcoming as you’d imagine from reading Anne of Green Gables . When I asked a chef of a local restaurant in PEI whether he felt today’s islanders held any similarities to those portrayed in the L. M. Montgomery books, he spent twenty minutes telling us how the farmers and restaurants work together and help one another out when needed. Another time, a historical village reenactor broke character to talk to us when we asked about Montgomery’s books’ effects on local life. To plan your own trip to PEI read Plan the Perfect Anne of Green Gables Vacation .

Tromping on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast

On another English literature trip, following in the footsteps of British author Enid Blyton, I joined a hiking group to tromp through the countryside like the characters in the Famous Five books that had inspired the trip. Not only did this take me somewhere I would not normally have seen as a tourist, but the locals in this hiking group were the first people I’d ever met who were familiar with the books I’d loved since childhood. I was happy to have found anyone who I could chat with about the stories and find out if their lives were similar to the characters in any way.

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Travel Literature

These books will have you trip planning in no time!

• Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
• The Famous Five by Enid Blyton
• Burmese Days by George Orwell
• Novel Destinations: A Travel Guide to Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West by Shannon McKenna Schmidt, Joni Rendon
• Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World by Richard Kreitner

Plan Your own Literary Trips

I hope this literary travel guide has inspired you to find a book to complement your next trip ! For more literary travel suggestions and tips, visit A Suitcase Full of Books . And if you do plan your own literary trip, I’d love to hear about it!

This Guest Post was contributed by A Suitcase Full of Books

We love to learn from our guest writers and appreciate their expertise! Visit her website by clicking on the image or name below. 

asuitcasefullofbooks

I am a literary inspired travel blogger.

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Welcome to Trip Scholars!

If you are on this site, you probably already know that travel is one of life’s greatest teachers. You want  to get as much out of your trips as possible.

But you are busy and don’t have a lot of free time. I have a free travel planning guide that will help you have more meaningful trips!

I’ll show you how you can use the excitement of your upcoming trip to turn everyday activities into opportunities for learning and connection.

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12 thoughts on “Plan Your Own Amazing Literary Trips”

I love this travel idea! I sometimes like to look out for places in movies but never thought to use books!

Yay! It’s surprising how many bookish locations there are when you start looking for them!

What a fun idea! I’ve never done this before, but I’m definitely going to give it a try for one of my trips this year! Thanks for the inspiration 🙂

I’m so glad you’re inspired! Do you have a book in mind that would make a great trip?

Ever since I read the whole series of Anne of Green Gables in primary school, I’ve always wanted to visit the Prince Edward Island. I haven’t had a chance to set foot in North America yet, but when I do, I will definitely go there.

I hope you get to go some day!

What an interesting concept! This may be a bit niche for the way I personally travel, but I do like the idea!

I like the idea too and we have used it on our own trips!

Foodie trips, history trips, I have heard of those….but a literary trip? I love it! What an interesting way to experience the area. Thanks for the tips!

You’re welcome!

I love this idea of literary-inspired travel! I’ve done filming locations and a few author homes. Will need to make this intentional!

I think it is a fantastic idea too and really appreciate @asuitcasefullofbooks sharing such helpful tips and ideas about how to do it so well!

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10 Small Towns In The Great Smoky Mountains To Visit In Winter

This city in new york was named the number one city in america, here's why, underrated, but scenic: this small town in tennessee is a great alternative to nashville.

Bookworms have an unyielding fascination with libraries and anything that promotes literacy. Literary tourism is a concept that celebrates reading culture. The idea is to visit places around the world that have been featured in your favorite fictional novels. An even larger form of literary tourism dedicates travel to indulging in pristine book-ridden venues or even the homes of classic authors.

Whichever method you choose, literary referenced destinations are available in virtually any spot in the world. Travelers needn't be an English major to appreciate these worldly book receptacles. Check out these 10 must-see destinations for any book-loving traveler.

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10 The Fable Bar

Located in London, The Fable bar is inspired by fairytales and the fables of Aesop. The fantasy-themed bar and restaurant is subtle and playful. The concept is spread over three different levels and offers a stunning fairy-tale escape from London's busy streets. It's the perfect place to enjoy brunch, have some tea, and geek out with your fellow book-lovers over your latest read.

9 Trinity College

This college in Dublin, Ireland is a novel enthusiasts dream. The campus holds one of the most exquisite and gorgeous libraries in all of Europe. Built on several stories the shelves of books both new and old seem endless. The Library of Trinity College is the largest library in all of Ireland, with over five million books sitting on display. It gets 10,000 new items almost every year, and, considering the library has been around since the 1500s, it might be time to expand this novel architecture.

8 Shakespeare’s Globe

The Shakespeare Globe in London is a unique housing unit that protects the famous Globe Theater. This theater is acknowledged by its use by acclaimed writer William Shakespeare. The original globe was built in 1599 but destroyed in the 1614 fire. It was reconstructed just a few years later, only to be demolished. The constant rise of this spectacle certainly speaks to its popularity among travelers. The Globe officially reopened in just 1997 as a way to pay tribute to the former theater. It now allows 1,400 spectators to watch as local actors try their hand on the stage that Shakespeare once stood.

7 Library Hotel

If you can't dedicate an entire journey to literary tourism, then at least you can stay in gems like the Library Hotel. This unique stay is fashioned just off of Madison Square in New York City. If you are one of the lucky 60 occupants that make up its rooms, you will be pleased with your own in-room library. Each guest has their own personal library of fifty to one hundred books, not including the bookshelves situated around the lobby. The hotel is expertly themed using thing Dewy Decibel System. Each floor is labeled as according to genre—for example, the fifth floor is the Science floor. Every room is also decorated to fit its own subcategories such as Poetry, Botany, Music, and even Erotic Literature.

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6 Jane Austen Centre

The influential English novelist, Jane Austen, has a museum dedicated to her own experiences in Bath, England. Outside is a newly commissioned wax figure of the historical figure. Inside, you will learn all about Austen's life in the city and how it affected her writing. Visitors can enjoy an afternoon tea in the Regency Tea Room, explore the jam-packed gift shop, or even stop by for their annual festival. Tickets for the event go on sale in June for the September event. A week-long devotion to Jane Austen offers guests the chance to live life like Jane Austen. activities include bonnet making, dancing, cooking, readings, and theatre performances.

5 Hotel Monteleone

This luxury New Orleans hotel is a beautiful fixture in the French Corner. The Beaux-Arts architectural style is derived from the late 1800s when this monument was commissioned. The family owned and operated unit earned its claim to fame, not by its gorgeous framework, but by its esteemed literary guest. Tennesse Williams, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway all reference this magnificent hotel in their works. William and Faulker even stayed here as a way to procure inspiration. Its association and reference in these classic works of writing have earned its place as an official literary landmark.

4 Book and Bed

Bibliphhilios will revel at this fascinating opportunity. This hostel is Tokyo, Japan encourages its guests to curl up and read during their stay. Their rooms are cushioned with walls of books so that anyone can find something that they might enjoy. Did we mention that your bed would be inside an actual bookshelf? Yep, finally a place to breath in that famous book-smell. You'll be surrounded by stacked wooden shelves inside your cozy oasis. If you can put down your book, you can scurry into their lobby and enjoy a refreshing coffee in the cafe.

RELATED: The Top 10 Places For Harry Potter Fans To Visit

3 Zhongshuge

Zhongshuge looks like an endless tunnel of books. This beautiful architecture is sure to make any book-lover swoon, but really, it's all just a fantasy.  To make this bookshop in China look like an endless unit of reading supply, black mirrors are laid out on the ground floor, and the bookshelves are built at an arc to give into the illusion. The idea to make this room look like a flowing river of books actually comes from the city of Yangzhou itself. Some of China's greatest writers drew inspiration from the town's endless supply of rivers and canals. So naturally, there needed to be a bookshop to pay homage to it.

2 Hay-on-Wye, Wales

This little town doubles as a ceaseless bookshop. At just about every corner, wanderers will find one of the town's antique bookshops. Bibliophiles in the U.K frequent this tiny village to get their hands on coveted titles or second-hand novels. There are over two dozen bookshops in Hay-on-Wye, which is why locals refer to it as the "town of books."

1 Ernest Hemingway House

The Florida Keys is famous for its sun and sand, which is actually what drew in classic artists like Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway spent a part of his life nestled into this tropical oasis. His former home now acts as a museum in his honor, where book lovers can see how the famous author once lived. You can take a 30-minute guided tour for just $14 and learn all about Hemingway's writing process and time in the Keys. You'll get to see key features of the home, including its luscious gardens. Visitors will more than likely also catch a glimpse of the home's cats. The home holds 40-50 polydactyl, or six-toed, cats in remembrance of Hemingway's own polydactyl cat. Hemingway named his cats after famous people, and the Hemingway House continues to follow his tradition to this day!

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Literary travel

• 2.1 Argentina
• 2.4 Colombia
• 2.6 Nicaragua
• 2.7 United States of America
• 3.2 Czech Republic
• 3.3 Denmark
• 3.4 Finland
• 3.6 Germany
• 3.7 Ireland
• 3.10 Portugal
• 3.11 Romania
• 3.12 Russia
• 3.13 Slovenia
• 3.15 Sweden
• 3.16 Ukraine
• 3.17 United Kingdom
• 4.4 Myanmar
• 4.5 South Korea
• 5.2 South Africa
• 6 Stay safe

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Literary travel is a form of tourism centered on great works of literature, literary movements, the literature surrounding cultural and political movements, or beloved authors. Just pick your favorite writer and do a little research: they all lived somewhere!

• Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Anyone in Buenos Aires might look out for places associated with Jorge Luis Borges.

A huge country with a wide host of major giant writers widely scattered apart. Jorge Amado comes from Bahia and writes mostly about Salvador with its huge bay and Ilhéus with its cocoa plantations. José de Alencar comes from Fortaleza , Paulo Leminski from Curitiba , father Érico and son Luis Fernando Verissimo from Porto Alegre , Guimarães Rosa from inner Minas Gerais and a whole lot of them from the former capital Rio de Janeiro . In Ipanema, check out Vinicius de Moraes street, named after the poet who was drinking with songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim at a bar, when a gorgeous blonde passed by. Together they seized the inspiration and wrote "The Girl from Ipanema". The bar is still there, renamed "Garota de Ipanema". As for the girls, Jobim once remarked wisely "...as you get older, they keep getting prettier and prettier...."

Any little Anne can visit the actual Green Gables in Cavendish , Prince Edward Island ; visitors come from as far afield as Japan . Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake are known for their live performances of Shakespeare and Shaw respectively, despite the real Stratford-upon-Avon being in the United Kingdom . Statues paying homage to "Winnie", the real life inspiration for A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh , stand in Winnipeg 's Assiniboine Park and in her hometown of White River (Ontario)

Various sites in Canada and the US recall Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Underground Railroad era, including the home of Rev. Josiah Henson (Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Chatham-Kent ), the First Parish Church in Brunswick (Maine) , the author's home (Harriet Beecher Stowe House & Library in Hartford , Connecticut, USA), a Harriet Beecher-Stowe House in Cincinnati and the author's grave site in Andover (Massachusetts) .

Gabriel García Márquez set Chronicle of a Death Foretold in the beautiful city of Santa Cruz de Mompox . If you're a big fan, go to his birthplace at Aracataca , the inspiration for Macondo.

The country's most prestigious literary event is the annual Guadalajara International Book Fair , held in late November to early December. It regularly attracts more than 1 million visitors and features keynote speakers from the world's top writers. Although George R.R. Martin was the keynote speaker in 2016, there is no truth to the rumor that half the audience ended up dead and dismembered in gruesome ways. More than 2,000 publishers take part in the exhibition at the Guadalajara Expo Center.

A number of authors of both Spanish and English language novels set their stories in Mexico. One of the most famous was Laura Esquivel's Como Agua Para Chocolate ( Like Water for Chocolate ), which is set in the Northern Mexico state of Chihuahua during the violent period of the Mexican Revolution . Pulitzer-Prize winner John Steinbeck set his novel, The Pearl in the fishing community of La Paz in Baja California , Steinbeck's story is a universal tale of greed and sorrow. Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez loved fellow writer Juan Rulfo's novel, Pedro Paramo , so much that he's said to have memorized it word for word so that he could recite it forward or backward. Rulfo's novel is a story of Comala , Colima 's history, told through the empty eye sockets of the town's dead. Those literary types sure are a bucket of laughs, aren't they!

If it's poetry that trips your literary trigger, the two biggest names in Mexico are Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, who wrote during Mexico's tumultuous colonial period and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz if you want a more modern style of poetry.

The proud home of Rubén Darío whose birthplace has since been named in his honor. León, a longtime home of the poet, hosts a museum dedicated to his legacy. Another treasure of Nicaraguan folklore is "El Güegüense" a work of popular theater pitting native wit against Spanish might. The 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and subsequent civil war also produced quite a bit of poetry and music with names like Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli and the Mejia Godoy brothers known the world around. Cardenal spent large parts of his life on Solentiname .

United States of America

Fans of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" might want to visit Concord, Massachusetts . Essex County in the North Shore of Massachusetts is often the setting of H. P. Lovecraft's works, whose followers refer to the area as "Miskatonic County" (after a fictional river in the region) or "Lovecraft Country". You won't find the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow , but you can find Washington Irving's grave there. Travelers to Hartford can visit the Mark Twain House and Museum and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and Library; Mark Twain (whose real name was Samuel Clemens) fans can also visit his boyhood village of Hannibal on the Mississippi River .

Head west in the footsteps of the Beats, or follow Route 66 like the Joads in Grapes of Wrath .

You can find Cannery Row in Monterey, California ; nearby are many places dedicated to the memory of John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. There are several sites related to "the book" ( Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil , the non-fiction novel by John Berendt) in Savannah , particularly Forsythe Park.

In Houston , fans of Morton Feldman can visit the actual Rothko Chapel. Fans of the Friday Night Lights franchise may be interested in Ratliff Stadium in Odessa, Texas , the home football stadium of the city's two main high schools—one of them being Permian High, whose 1988 football season was the subject of both the book that spawned the franchise and the later film.

Alaska has its share of literary spots too. Fans of Jack London must visit Skagway . Those who read the bestseller Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, about the exploits of Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, would want to visit Denali National Park , near Talkeetna .

The Old West has many stories.

Fans of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire , the book series on which the hit television series Game of Thrones was based, may wish to visit Santa Fe , where the author resides and owns a cinema in which he occasionally screens episodes of the TV series. Martin's alma mater, Northwestern University , in Evanston , Illinois , is one of the premier universities in United States with a beautifully landscaped lakeside campus. Its journalism school, of which Martin is a graduate, is also widely regarded as one of the top journalism schools in the country.

Locals believe that the Othello Castle, part of the city walls of Famagusta in Northern Cyprus , is the setting of Shakespearean tragedy of the same name, although the text does not name any specific locations on the island.

United Kingdom

True Chaucerian pilgrims should leave London by the road to Canterbury , while lovers of the Bard may wish to drop into William Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon . Anyone who ever longed to have their own bodice ripped by Rochester or Heathcliff would want to visit Brontë Country in West Yorkshire. If you're not afraid of Virginia Woolf, visit Monk's House in East Sussex . Or search for King Arthur and Merlin in Tintagel and Glastonbury . Besides what you'd find in London, Broadstairs is dedicated to Dickens. Swansea and neighbouring Carmarthenshire are all about Dylan Thomas. And setting aside all prejudice, Hampshire is the proud home of Jane Austen; see Jane Austen tourism .

Perhaps more of us would prefer to visit Hartfield in Ashdown Forest , the setting of the Winnie the Pooh stories, or Cumbria where various sites associated with Beatrix Potter can be found. If you can't get enough of talking animals larking about in boats, head to Wind in the Willows country, a tranquil stretch of the Thames straddling Berkshire and Oxfordshire . Statues remembering Robin Hood, H.G. Wells' Martian tripods, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan stand respectively in Nottingham , Woking , Baker Street and Kensington Gardens .

Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beasties; look no further than Dumfries – Robert Burns' House competes for visitors with nearby Alloway 's Robert Burns' Birthplace. Over in Edinburgh , Burns is celebrated alongside Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson in the Writers' Museum. The capital's Princes Street even has a monument celebrating Scott's achievements in putting his hometown on the literary map, a tradition which continues to this day with the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival.

In Devon is the little village of Bigbury-on-Sea, where Agatha Christie fans can find the Burgh Island Hotel, inspiration for And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun . Looking for a crime? The room named for her will set you back 450 quid. The more theatrically inclined could instead stay in the Noël Coward room. While you're in the area, a trip up to Dartmoor may prove to be your last, if you come face to face with the Hound of the Baskervilles. Should you survive, a hop over to Bram Stoker's Whitby ( North Yorkshire ) might finish you off.

As if Britain weren't mythical enough, many of its landscapes have inspired fantasy worlds. Shropshire 's bucolic hills look as though they may be home to J.R.R. Tolkien's hobbits, while the Wrekin is a Lonely Mountain by any other name, but the true Arthurian land of Albion is Wales . Lewis Carroll's surroundings of Cheshire and Oxford were once weird enough to influence his hallucinogenic creation of Wonderland. Dorset doubles for Thomas Hardy's "Wessex", Northern Ireland is a more doable trip than Narnia or Westeros (but the scenery is just as good), and anyone wishing to get to Hogwarts need only board a train at King's Cross station . Please, no Muggles.

Another popular destination for literary tourists is the city of Oxford , home to the famous University of Oxford which produced many world-renowned authors of the fantasy genre such as Lewis Carroll ( Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ), C.S. Lewis ( The Chronicles of Narnia ), J.R.R. Tolkien ( The Lord of the Rings ) and Philip Pullman ( His Dark Materials ). Tolkien and Lewis were part of a group of writers known as The Inklings , which met regularly at a pub known as the Eagle and Child

Asia and Oceania

On the other side of the world, lovers of The Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦) will want to spend a few hours contemplating the Garden of the Humble Administrator in Suzhou , and anyone who knows The True Story of Ah Q (阿Q正传) might want to visit Hangzhou , where Lu Xun was imprisoned. Lu Xun's hometown of Shaoxing is just 20 minutes by high-speed train from Hangzhou.

The city of Huai'an was the birthplace of the Ming Dynasty author Wu Cheng'en, who wrote Journey to the West (西游记), one of China's four great novels. The novel is a fictionalized account of the journey of Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang to India to collect Buddhist scriptures, with mythical elements thrown in. Wu's former residence has been restored as a museum. The historical Xuanzang made his journey to India via the Silk Road , parts of which can still be traversed today.

Fans of the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore will enjoy Santiniketan , and readers of Rudyard Kipling will want to check out the places where Kim is supposed to have roamed.

Aspiring novelists might find inspiration at Ishiyamadera Temple in Otsu , where Murasaki Shikibu is believed to have written (or at least begun to write) The Tale of Genji .

Then take the Narrow Road to the Deep North .

Eric Blair (later known by his pen-name George Orwell) spent five years as a police officer in colonial Burma (now called Myanmar), and used his experiences in his first novel, Burmese Days . If you visit the country without having read it, stalls across Myanmar sell counterfeit copies of it for a few dollars. Individuals wishing to retrace Orwell's footsteps have a great many options. In chronological order, his time in the country began in 1922 when he entered the police training school at Mandalay . The hill station of Maymyo (now Pyin Oo Lwin) was his first posting in 1923, followed by Twante in the Ayerawaddy delta in 1924, and the oil refinery town of Syriam (now Thanlyin) in 1925. In 1926 he was posted to Moulmein (now Mawlamyine), where his mother grew up and where his grandmother lived at the time. He wrote the essay Shooting An Elephant based on his experiences during that posting. However, the town most important to Orwell's literary development was Katha , his final posting, in 1926–7. Burmese Days was set in and around the town, renamed Kyauktada in the novel, and many of the locations referenced in the novel are real places that can still be visited.

South Korea

Gayasan Mountain National Park includes Haeinsa Temple, where the Tripitaka Koreana , a landmark in woodblock printing, is held.

Tongyeong is often visited because it is the setting of Land by Park Kyeong-Ni.

Troy is the scene of the Iliad , the first known work of Greek literature.

Orhan Pamuk's "The Museum of Innocence" actually exists in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul . His novel Snow ( Kar ) is set in Kars in the far east of the country.

Agatha Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, then a grand old hotel serving rail passengers at the southern terminus of the main Paris -Istanbul Orient Express (1883-1962) route. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author.

Those looking for Yaşar Kemal's Çukurova of greedy landlords, noble outlaws, landless peasants, and involuntary nomad-cum-farmers will probably want to spend some time in the Cilician Plains .

The oldest literary work ever is called The Maxims of Ptah Hotep . The author, a wise and not-so-famous vizier, was buried in a tomb that nowadays is more famous than himself, at Saqqara .

Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab writer to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1988), was born in Cairo . His most famous work, The Cairo Trilogy , depicts the lives of three generations of different families in Cairo from World War I until after the 1952 military coup that overthrew King Farouk. His classic novel Midaq Alley is wholly ambiented in a tiny space inside the Khan El Kalili bazaar.

South Africa

About 145 km outside of Durban , Alan Paton fans can find Ixopo, and look for the lovely road that runs from there into the hills. J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of the famed Lord of the Rings books, was born in Bloemfontein , though there is surprisingly little commemorating him in his city of birth.

Visit the "stay safe" sections of the Wikivoyage places for wherever you go, and remember that just because your favorite authors chain-smoked or enjoyed some absinth dreams doesn't mean you should! (If you must read and walk, read A Book Lover's Guide to Reading and Walking at the Same Time! )

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• Fiction tourism
• Harry Potter tourism
• Philosophy tourism
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The Best Travel Literature of All Time

Like many travellers, you may have found yourself immersed in the voyages of those who have gone before you from time to time. While living vicariously is no replacement for being on the road, there are some utterly wonderful nonfiction travel books out there, which are the next best thing.

A Time of Gifts by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

It’s quite genuinely impossible to create a comprehensive list of the best travel literature. While there’s a lot of replication of these types of lists out there, some books endure precisely because of their importance at the time or to other writers. Although some authors listed below deserve to have more than one of their books featured on this compendium of the greatest travel literature, only their finest work has been included. Consider it your gateway to that writer’s greater oeuvre, if you’ve not read any of their work previously; a reminder if you have. Similarly, non-male writers have often been unfortunately overlooked in the past and some real gems that deserve to be on the best travel literature of all-time lists have been overlooked.

The following aims to redress the balance a little. Consideration is also given to some of the works that defined people who are now better-known for their other exploits, because there’s no greater adventure than that of somebody whose travels inspired them to do something more important or lasting in the world beyond merely moving through space and time for travel’s sake. Here are twenty of the best pieces of travel literature ever written (theoretically), to guide you to your next read, to find inspiration for your next trip, or to simply use as a general reading checklist until your next journey.

A Time of Gifts (1977) – Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Writing about Paddy Leigh Fermor in 2020, it would be easy to dismiss the great writer as a privileged individual who was fortunate to stay with royalty and the well-to-do all across Europe as he sauntered from one place to the next. But that would be an awful disservice. A Time of Gifts is the first of a trilogy of books documenting his journey, on foot, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul). His scholarship and complete immersion in every culture he encountered helped his writing transcend mere travel literature to reach a higher level of writing. You never feel as though he’s an outside observer trying to make sense of the foreign by superimposing his own beliefs. His prose has been described as baroque, and is densely layered with a deep intelligence, understanding and, above all, passion for everything he encounters. The trip itself was undertaken in 1933/4 and the Europe that Fermor uncovers on his peregrinations is one which is beginning to spiral blindly into major conflict. Somehow this aspect makes the random acts of kindness he experiences across Germany and the rest of the continent even more bittersweet.

Publisher: John Murray, Buy at Amazon.com

Arabian Sands (1959) – Sir Wilfred Thesiger

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Photo: courtesy of P.S. Burton via Wikimedia Commons)

Another travel literature classic is Thesiger’s intrepid anthropological look at Bedouin culture and lifestyle in one of the remotest, most inhospitable places on earth: the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub’ al Khali. The setting for the journey is amid the embers of World War II, the repercussions of which were being felt worldwide, including among the Bedouin tribes who’d lived much in the same way they always had until the outside world intruded. In effect, this book offers a snapshot of a remarkable culture that was fast altering, which is what makes this, and many of the books written during the reign of the British Empire, fascinating historical documents. For all of the rightful condemnation of European colonialism, one thing is clear in this book: the fascination and inquisitive nature of the many British scholarly individuals sent to far-reaching corners of the globe created an immensely valuable cache of first-person accounts of cultures and peoples that may not have been recorded otherwise amid the inevitable and inescapable rise of globalisation of the time.

Publisher: Penguin Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) – Rebecca West

West’s voluminous, in-depth examination of Yugoslavia during her time travelling there in 1937 was designed to explore how the country was a reflection of its past. West spent six weeks journeying across the whole region with her husband and meeting eminent citizens along the way. Sadly, by the time the book was published, the Nazis had invaded and the country would never be the same again, which makes this yet another invaluable early-20 th -century document. What sets Black Lamb and Grey Falcon apart though is the level of exquisite detail and research dedicated to the subject. If there was any proof required that travel literature serves an invaluable purpose as a piece of primary historical evidence, then this may well be it.

Publisher: Canongate Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Border (2017) – Kapka Kassabova

Beautifully written and layered with a real sense of atmosphere, Kassabova’s haunting Border is one of the standout pieces of travel writing to be published in the last decade. Eastern Europe is one of the least explored regions of the world in travel literature. Owing perhaps in part to the secrecy and legacy of distrust brought about by the Cold War, even those who have travelled through as part of longer journeys (Paul Theroux in Pillars of Hercules or Bill Bryson in Neither Here Nor There ) scarcely shed any real light on the region. Here, Kassabova heads back to the nation of her birth (Bulgaria) to explore the fragments of political ideology, faith and race, and the blurred lines between them, that have developed around the border region separating Bulgaria from Greece and Turkey.

Publisher: Granta Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Border by Kapka Kasabova (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – George Orwell

While much of travel literature is concerned with the voyage and seeking out the miraculous, the unique and the lesser known, Orwell took another route entirely. Down and Out in Paris and London does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a memoir of impoverished living in two of the world’s great cities, at a time when they were global beacons in terms of both power and culture. Not only does this book, in a very prescient move, eschew the superior tone of academia when examining the other, it also avoids all glamour in those cities, focussing entirely on the poor, the meek and the desperate. In Paris he lives on the edge of eviction, working the kitchens of a fancy establishment, while in London he lives the life of a tramp, moving from one bunkhouse and soup kitchen to the next, living day to day. It is to travel writing what the ‘method’ is to acting.

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – Hunter S. Thompson

The outlier on this list (all good lists need one) is Hunter S. Thompson’s delightfully absurd, occasionally apocryphal and downright debauched novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . In it, he created a new way of writing known as gonzo journalism, a style of storytelling which is found most commonly today in some documentaries, where the lines of fact and fiction become blurred and with the journalist placed as a central character in the story. This brilliant commentary on the flexible and inconsistent nature of truth was perfectly epitomised by the increasingly hallucinogenic recollections of protagonist Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. The road trip to Las Vegas ultimately casts important light on an American society gripped by racism and violence (partly why the story is still so powerful today is that America hasn’t yet learned to grow up). As such it remains one of the most intriguing snapshots of America out there, surpassing the work of many strait-laced travel narratives in the process.

Publisher: Random House Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Photo: Mathieu Croisetière via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975) – Paul Theroux

A perfect example of how gonzo journalism began to seep into travel literature comes from what is arguably the most important modern travelogue: The Great Railway Bazaar . In it, Theroux travels from London all the way to Southeast Asia and Japan, via India, then back to Europe via Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway. While Theroux upholds elements of the old school travel narrative – like the scholarly, studious approach and the inquisitive air – his journey by train is as much about the growing backpacker, hippie, trail and the western counterculture that encouraged it. Occasionally the line between fact and fiction is blurred in his writing, but only to better convey his interactions with the people he met. As such, you get a fascinating look at what could be called modern colonialism, whereby the train networks that were often built by colonial rulers in non-European nations across the world, like India and Burma, were now being used by a new generation in the post-colonial era to explore these newly-sovereign nations.

In Patagonia (1977) – Bruce Chatwin

Coming hot on the tail of Theroux’s above book is perhaps the most popular and enduring travel book of all time: In Patagonia . Bruce Chatwin starts it off with a direct nod to writing and journalism’s slide into apocrypha by framing his trip loosely around the search for remains of a “brontosaurus” found in a Patagonian cave, which he first found languishing in his grandparent’s house. The doubtful story behind this find sets him on a road where he aim to unravel various other mysteries whose only connection is geographical, including the final resting place of Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, in the wild, empty spaces of South America. It’s a brilliant book formed of loose sections that don’t directly link to one another but has greatly influenced modern travel literature today.

Publisher: Vintage Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

In Xanadu (1989) – William Dalrymple

One of the travel writers greatly influenced by Chatwin was William Dalrymple, whose own quest for his first book, In Xanadu , was framed as a search for the fabled palace of Kublai Khan, Xanadu. This type of narrative has always proven to be a ready source of inspiration for some of the better modern travel books; searching for answers to popular mysteries. It has a journalistic bent to it, and manages to sidestep the awkwardness of westerners merely travelling abroad and casting aspersions about the people and cultures they encounter through an imperial gaze, as is the criticism often lodged again some of the earlier works of travel writing. Here, Dalrymple follows in the footsteps of Marco Polo (following footsteps of somebody famous is also a common trope of travel literature) to find the palace. While Dalrymple restores elements of the scholarly, learned approach common to writers like Robert Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor, you can feel the impact of those 70s writers as well.

Publisher: Flamingo, Buy at Amazon.com

In Xanadu by William Dalrymple (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Into the Wild (1996) – Jon Krakauer

Few gripping travel narratives manage to capture the why? of our impulse to roam quite like Jon Krakauer does in Into the Wild . The book is both harrowing and revelatory, while performing a third-person character study on a young man he never actually met. In 1992 Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness and never came back out. The book tries to examine what had led him there in the first place, whether he’d intended to return at all, and why he wasn’t the first to try and cut all ties with modern society. Krakauer looks to others, such as Henry David Thoreau ( Walden is the original escape from society book and a must-read for anybody fascinated by this subject), who successfully parted from the rat race, as well as the reasons McCandless initially fled from well-to-do family life years before and never contacted them again in his search for something more profound and meaningful. While most readers may disagree with McCandless’s methods, his motives seem far more familiar and relatable.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, Buy at Amazon.com

The Living Mountain (1977) – Nan Shepherd

Perhaps one of the finest pieces of nature writing ever committed to paper is The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. Sadly, it’s also one of the most underrated books. The research for her book was undertaken in and around 1942, during the Second World War, which didn’t trouble the wilds of Scotland too badly. Here, the stark beauty of the Cairngorms seems to mirror the harsh reality of war. But Shepherd’s deep examination of the various microcosms of life that thrive on the region’s mountains is really a poem that exalts life. It’s a celebration of survival and endurance. Her wonderful book almost never made it to print, lying in a drawer for decades until a friend read it and encouraged her to seek out a publisher. We’re lucky it did.

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Motorcycle Diaries (1992) – Che Guevara

Even if Che Guevara never became the revolutionary and icon of a generation that he did, The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating first-person account of travel’s capacity to broaden the mind. The young medic Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara sets out from his home in Buenos Aires with his friend Alberto Granado sharing a motorcycle ‘La Poderosa’ and in his pointed recollections, you can almost feel Che’s ideological shift. He sees poverty and pain and beauty in the poor communities they visit, and through this, we learn a lot about how Guevara became a key player in the Cuban Revolution. But it’s also a beautiful rumination about the paths we take in life and the importance of curiosity.

Publisher: Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island (1995) – Bill Bryson

You can’t really write a top travel literature list and omit Bill Bryson. He’s one of the finest travel writers still producing books. Notes from a Small Island is particularly intriguing because, while most of the books that make any top travel literature list tend to be written by Brits, this is a book about Britain, written by an American. And it’s a delightfully observed book at that, pinpointing the eccentricities and unusual aspects of the island nation that most Brits would never think twice about, but when seen through foreign eyes suddenly become absurd. Bryson is especially gifted at making even the most mundane things seem funny. His books neatly balance thorough research and scholarship with humour and keen observation, effectively amalgamating all of the key aspects of travel literature into one inimitable style.

Publisher: Black Swan, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Photo: Wolf Gang via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

On the Road (1957) – Jack Kerouac

Before modern travel literature’s more self-aware phase that started in the 1970s, we had what essentially kick-started the great 20 th -century American cultural upheaval: The Beat Movement. Kerouac was writing about sexual promiscuity, wanton drug use and giving the establishment the middle finger way before it was cool to do so. Well-educated and moving in New York’s literary circles, Kerouac’s thinly-veiled characters in On the Road (substituting Old Bull Lee for William S. Burroughs, Dean Moriarty for Neal Cassady, Carlo Marx for Allen Ginsberg, and Sal Paradise for himself) are painted into a quasi-fictional account of his cross-country jaunts in the late 1940s. The post-war world was much-changed; the white picket fence America with its Jim Crow segregation and uptight Bible-belt hypocrisy were no longer acceptable. Around the same time, J.D. Salinger was branding it phoney, while Kerouac was realising this in his own way, by embracing escapism and drugs. On the Road still resonates today; both the book and the Beats gave licence to a generation of youths to question the oppressive system that became all too obvious in the 60s.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Road to Oxiana (1937) – Robert Byron

Much of the Afghanistan and Iran of Byron’s writing has disappeared, making the precision of his prose all the more valuable. The Road to Oxiana has all the classic elements of earlier travel narratives in it, scholarship, keen observation but also the kind of humour and casual presentation that would become far more popular in the writing styles common to the latter half of the 20 th century. Byron’s constant use of Marjoribanks to replace the name of the Persian ruler of the time was designed to evade censure or punishment in case his notebooks were confiscated and read. The humour of this rebelliousness is not lost when read today, even if some of his style may feel a little bit dated now. His architectural descriptions may be among some of the finest in all of travel literature.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Rome and a Villa (1952) – Eleanor Clark

Because the majority of travel writing is crafted around a voyage or quest of some sort, we expect the movement to transcend places, countries even. What Clark does exceptionally well in Rome and a Villa is offer an in-depth depiction of just one city: Rome. This book, although not particularly tied to or crafted around any one specific idea, offers a deeper understanding of The Eternal City based on Clark’s explorations, often on foot. Indeed, her scholarly treatment of the Italian capital brings the city’s rich, storied past to life in imaginative and illuminating ways that offer fresh insight on a place that we may easily think has already been well covered already. Which goes to show that places change with the times offering an opportunity for fresh perspectives. There’s nowhere that is dull or too well-known in travel writing if handled by the right scribe.

Publisher: Harper Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road (2007) – Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron’s fascination with worlds that are ostensibly closed off to westerners has often led him into places that many others wouldn’t think to go. He visited China before it had opened up to the world, and the same goes for Soviet Russia. In Shadow of the Silk Road Thubron exhibits why his books are perhaps the most masterfully crafted of all contemporary travel literature. His pacing and descriptive writing are exquisite, particularly in this book, in which he journeys from Xi’an to Antakya in Turkey following the old ways, through Central Asia, once known as the Silk Road. The worlds he uncovers and the people he meets are painstakingly woven into a rich text, much like a hand-woven Persian rug, that is one of the most evocative pieces of travel writing out there.

Publisher: Vintage, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Travels with Myself and Another (1979) – Martha Gellhorn

Even if Martha Gellhorn was writing today, she would rightly be upheld as one of the great journalists, but given that she was doing it decades ago, often better than her counterparts in a male-dominated field, is even more remarkable. The ‘Another’ that accompanies Gellhorn through much of the book was her former husband Ernest Hemingway, but the book also includes memoir from Africa in which she voyages solo. The book is presented as a collection of essays, a format that has become increasingly common in travel writing and which effectively allows the book to focus on more than one topic. Gellhorn’s writing includes keen observation, lively wit and a really sharp political outlook.

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd., Buy at Amazon.com

The Valleys of the Assassins (1934) – Freya Stark

Stark was an incredible human being. Fluent in numerous languages, including Farsi, she travelled the world often alone at a time when even men undertaking such journeys were considered intrepid. Stark was particularly drawn to the Middle East and was able to recount the stories of the women there, living in devout Muslim communities, in a way no man would ever have been able to do. She also discovered regions that had not been explored by Westerners before, including the Valley of the Assassins, which forms the basis of this eponymous book, receiving the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Back Award in the process. She continued to write books well into her 90s (releasing work over six decades) and died in Italy at the age of 100.

Publisher: Modern Library Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012) – Cheryl Strayed

Some may question this popular book’s inclusion on a list of the all-time greats, but it really has all the ingredients of a classic exploration of the human psyche. The physical duress that Strayed experienced on her hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (which runs from California’s border with Mexico to Washington’s border with Canada), and the gradual loss of her toenails as a result, is depicted with visceral precision. Her self-inflicted pain mirrors the mental health and dependency issues that plagued her before embarking on the feat, and in the process, we discover the restorative power of travel, of meeting new people and of forcing ourselves to step beyond our comfortably-positioned boundaries. Like any good travel literature, this book sheds light on why travel is so addictive, powerful and pertinent. Just like all the other books on this list, you’ll finish it wanting to plan your next trip.

Publisher: Atlantic Books, Buy at Amazon.com

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Literary Tourism: A Cultural Trip?

• Conference paper
• First Online: 25 November 2019
• Cite this conference paper

• Ana Ferreira 9 ,
• Elisa Alén 10 ,
• Pedro Liberato 9 &
• Dália Liberato 9  

Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 171))

1975 Accesses

6 Citations

2 Altmetric

In this article, we intend to present literary tourism as a growing trend of cultural tourism. In fact, tourism and literature have a common element, the trip. Travelling, as an activity of making journeys, is an element of connection between different places and peoples and, therefore, it plays a crucial role in the tourism activity. Literature may be of great importance as it can make a place immortal, strengthening the growth of literary pilgrims, and satisfy the demands of cultural tourism. Literary tourism has several dimensions, being motivated by the interest concerning an author, in a literary creation or setting, or in the cultural heritage of a destination. This research concludes that it is important to understand visitor’s needs, and places linked to authors or literary creations must be used to promote destinations more proactively, having the support of local communities.

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Brito, L.M.: Tourism Promotion and Literary Itineraries in Robinson, M. and Picard, D. (eds) Conference Proceedings Tourism and Literature: travel, Imagination and Myth, 22-26 july 2004. Harrogate (2004).

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Ana Ferreira, Pedro Liberato & Dália Liberato

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Álvaro Rocha

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António Abreu

João Vidal de Carvalho

School of Hospitality and Tourism, Polytechnic of Porto, Vila do Conde, Portugal

Dália Liberato

Business Administration and Tourism, University of Vigo, Ourense, Spain

Elisa Alén González

School of Hospitality and Tourism, Polytechnic of Porto, VILA DO CONDE, Portugal

Pedro Liberato

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Ferreira, A., Alén, E., Liberato, P., Liberato, D. (2020). Literary Tourism: A Cultural Trip?. In: Rocha, Á., Abreu, A., de Carvalho, J., Liberato, D., González, E., Liberato, P. (eds) Advances in Tourism, Technology and Smart Systems. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 171. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2024-2_44

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What is a Travelogue?

Travel writing is a genre that is becoming increasingly popular. It seems that each week a new travel book gets published and every day more writers are interested in writing one. Yet, as interest in travel writing grows, so too does the need to clarify the questions: What exactly is a travelogue? And how does it compare to a travel book?

What is a travelogue?

A travelogue is a truthful account of an individual’s experiences traveling, usually told in the past tense and in the first person.

The word travelogue supposedly comes from a combination of the two words  travel  and  monologue . In turn, the word  monologue  comes from the Greek words  monos  (alone) and  logos  (speech, word). A travelogue is then, in its most basic form, a spoken or written account of an individual’s experiences traveling, which usually appears in the past tense, in the first person, and with some verisimilitude.

Because a travelogue aims to be a true account of an individual’s experiences traveling, descriptions of what the traveler sees, hears, tastes, smells, and feels in the external world while traveling are essential components . 

Of course, thoughts, feelings, and reflections are important parts of our experience of travel. So, descriptions of a traveler’s inner world are not out-of-place in the travelogue.

Likewise, notes and observations on history, society, and culture are also common features of travelogues, as we certainly learn about the world when we travel.

If you want to write a better travel stories, check out our tips to write better travelogues .

What are the types of travelogue?

A travelogue can exist in the form of a book, a blog, a diary or journal, an article or essay, a podcast, a lecture, a narrated slide show, or in virtually every written or spoken form of creation. 

There are many examples of travelogues online in the form of “travel blogs.”

However, not all travel blogs are travelogues in the pure sense of the term because some of their authors are less concerned with giving personal accounts of their own experiences traveling than capturing internet search traffic by providing tips, advice, or practical information about travel.

For example, they claim to present the “best things to do” in a particular destination instead of “what I did” there. Though, some travel blogs do publish hybrid travelogues that also provide tips and advice in order to market their travel services.

Travelogue books

Mark Twain’s  The Innocents Abroad  is a good example of a travelogue in book form. While it was published as a book in the 19 th  century, it is perhaps best characterized as a travelogue by today’s standards and not as a modern travel book . The frontispiece of the first edition in 1869 explains why:

In  The Innocents Abroad , Twain gives us and “account of the steamship  Quaker City ’s pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; with descriptions of countries, nations, incidents and adventures, as they appeared to the author.” It is a descriptive account of his travels and thoughts, sometimes funny and often bigoted. He tells us what he saw and what he felt while also offering historical and cultural remarks on the places he visited.

While it is well-written, I’m not sure the book has a story, a plot, a narrative arc, or a storyline that holds everything together. These are features seldom found in travelogues, R. K. Wilson reminds us in his 1973 study  The Literary Travelogue .

A destination isn’t a story. Neither is simply going from one place to another.

Instead,  The Innocents Abroad  is an account of Twain’s holiday, written as if were a letter to his mother half a world away. “Dear Mom,” we imagine the book starting.

Travelogues vs. travel books

As we have seen in the example above, a travelogue can exist in the form of a book. But this does not mean that it is the same thing as a  travel book as we understand it today. 

Indeed, terms like  travelogue  and  travel book  often get conflated. “Even [E.M.] Forster is uncertain what to call these things,” Paul Fussell wrote in his book  Abroad . “In 1941 he calls them  travelogues , in 1949  travel books .” Like Forster, Fussell conflates the terms.

In the last 100 years or so, we have seen the travel book evolve from the travelogue and mature into a more rarefied thing with its own set of stylistic and formal expectations. Carl Thompson calls this the  modern travel book , a concept he discusses in the early chapters of his academic study  Travel Writing . 

While it can appear in book form and evoke a day-to-day account like a logbook, a ship’s log, or a captain’s log, a travelogue does not necessarily have the formal dimensions and stylistic conceits of the  modern travel book .

A travelogue does not necessarily have the formal dimensions and stylistic conceits of the  modern travel book .

This is not to say that travelogues are not insightful or uninteresting. Quite the opposite. They are incredibly revealing and can expose a tremendous amount of information about the world, the writer, and the reader.

But the modern travel book is a different beast. Among other important distinctions, modern travel books and modern travelogues have stories , plots, and through-lines. A mission, quest, or journey isn’t a story in and of itself.

Perhaps making a distinction between a travelogue and the modern travel book is an elitist or academic move. But perhaps it is no more pompous to say this than it is to say that a modern novel has a specific form and style different from its earlier iterations.

Is the travel book a “sub-species of memoir,” as Fussell notes? Is travel writing even a genre? How do travelogues fit into the travel writing landscape?

Travel writing historians and scholars do not agree upon the definitions and boundaries of travel writing. The one thing they agree on is that there is no consensus on the definition. To that point, Thompson writes, “the boundaries of the travel writing genre are fuzzy, and there is little point in policing them too rigidly.”

P.S.: At the time of writing this, the Wikipedia article on The Innocents Abroad says that the book “presents itself as an ordinary travel book based on an actual voyage” (emphasis added). We’ll leave it at that.

Last Updated on 29 December 2020 by Travel Writing World

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Travel Writing World

With an emphasis on travel books and long-form travel literature, host Jeremy Bassetti talks with the world’s most inspiring travel writers about their work and about the business and craft of travel writing in this award-winning podcast and website. In addition to the podcast, the site also features travel writer profiles, book reviews, and articles.

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A sense of place in fiction: paris map-making..., travel book guidebook (free pdf download), gifts for travel writers [2023], note-taking apps for travel writers, travel journalists, and..., how to market a non-fiction book, websites for travel writers.

Extremely helpful; informative and insightful. Has stimulated me to dig a little deeper into the sub-divisions within travel writing and gain a better understanding of where my own Mad Cow in Galicia memoir series sits within the genre. Thank you.

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Literary Travel: Destinations Inspired by Writers

Losing yourself in a favorite book is great, but real-life wandering is better. Add these top literary travel destinations to your plans this year!

Travelers find inspiration for journeys from a variety of sources. Here at Let’s Roam, we recently explored the concept of “set-jetting”—choosing a travel destination based on a movie or TV show. So we thought we’d explore literary travel today! In this guide, we’ll explore all the best vacation spots that were featured in famous books, were the homes of acclaimed authors, or served as inspiration for a major literary work. We’ll focus on spots that not only have a strong history but also offer the traveler a unique and complete adventure. These fantastic destinations offer valuable insight into the minds of our favorite authors. They afford the opportunity to explore authors’ homes, walk the streets that served as inspiration, and join guided literary tours to learn all the behind-the-scenes information on our favorite stories. Let’s roam!

Exploring Edinburgh With Let’s Roam

Edinburgh should definitely be on your literary travel list. Its Elephant House is famously the favored cafe of Harry Potter author JK Rowling and is reported to be where she wrote many of the stories. Edinburgh is a fascinating city full of historic significance, stunning architecture, royal regalities, and traditional pubs. Let us guide you to all the top spots on the city’s famous Royal Mile on our scavenger hunt ! You’ll hunt for clues, complete photo and video challenges, and gather points as you go. Our Edinburgh hunt is the perfect way to explore this ancient city on a combination tour full of education and fun!

The Best Literary Travel Destinations for Book Lovers

Grand libraries, themed walking tours, unique bookstores of all kinds, quiet corner cafes and dank pubs, inspiring landscapes… they’re all part and parcel of a world-class literary destination. In this list, we’ll explore the stomping grounds of the greats, such as Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, and Jack Kerouac. Exploring the space in which an author created your favorite work is a virtual transportation through time and space. Just as the pages of a great novel carry the reader away to another place, standing in the shoes of our favorite authors can ferry the traveler to a faraway land that feels both alien and refreshingly familiar all at the same time.

You’ll leave each of these literary travel destinations with a deeper understanding of the author and the setting. You’ll likely also glean a more intimate understanding of nuances in the story that you may have missed in the initial reading. We highly recommend re-reading the stories inspired by these destinations just after your trip to see if they hit differently after visiting.

1. London, England

When it comes to literary destinations, it’s probably no surprise that we start our list with London. It’s the setting for Arthur Conan Doyle’s series of short stories on Sherlock Holmes and the location of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and where he wrote most of his beloved plays. And in these streets, mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll attempted to control his alter ego. From Harry Potter walking tours to the still-operating Smithfield Meat Market feature in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations , London is ripe with literary landmarks.

London Walks specializes in literary tours. They offer dozens focused on literary landmarks from the works and lives of Virginia Woolf, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and T.S. Eliot. London also offers several free walking tours featuring filming locations and inspirational spots for the Harry Potter series.

2. Pamplona, Spain

Pamplona exudes old-world charm, and it’s not surprising that greats like Ernest Hemingway found solace in its glitzy watering holes. The colorful Spanish architecture, stacked high in narrow alleyways, opening to grand squares of stunning facades, fountains, and sculpture offers a plethora of inspiration for a writer. The city is most famous for its annual running of the bulls, and it is this event that dominates the most riveting section of Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises. This was Hemingway’s first hit novel.

The author arrived in the Northern Spanish city at the age of 24 in 1923. While he was sent as a news reporter for the Toronto Star , the city inspired him to write on a different level. Hemingway’s favorite jaunt is a luxurious cafe on the main square called Café Iruña. Not only is it the most beautiful cafe around, but it also features a life-sized statue and plaque dedicated to the author. The cafe plays a central role in the novel, as well.

Partially due to his novel, the San Fermin Festival and the accompanying running of the bulls bloomed from a small event attracting a handful of tourists in the 1920s to a major event with over 40,000 spectators by the time Hemingway returned in 1959. Several hotels in the city claim to have suites where the writer worked, but most are unverified and charge outrageous prices for their most-likely false abodes. There is another representation of the author outside the famous Bull Ring.

3. Key West, Florida

Pamplona isn’t the only famous spot associated with the author. Hemingway also lived and wrote in Cuba for more than 30 years, producing The Old Man and the Sea , To Have and Have Not , and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cuba is a bit harder to visit on a tourist visa, though. If you want the perfect mix of Caribbean waters and literary itineraries, check out Key West, Florida.

Here, you’ll find the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum, the stunning Spanish Colonial home he built with his wife in the 1930s. Though he moved on in 1939, Hemingway retained ownership of the home until his tragic death, and the cats that live on the property are direct descendants of his beloved, six-toed kitty named Snow White.

4. Massachusetts, USA

Massachusetts has a very strong literary history, especially for such a small state. A road trip through Massachusetts is akin to a treasure hunt for literary masterpieces. Emily Dickinson owned two homes in the town of Amherst and attended university there. Robert Frost taught at the university. Start by taking a tour of the university. Visit the Robert Frost Library, and then tour the Emily Dickinson Museum and Historic Home.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott lived in Concord, where Alcott set her bestseller Little Women . You can tour each other their homes and visit Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden . There is a replica of his one-room cabin on the shores of the pond.

Edith Wharton made her home in Lenox, where you can tour her gorgeous home known as The Mount. Also, make sure to pop in one of the best bookstores around, The Bookstore (we said it’s one of the best, not one of the most innovative). Snuggle up with your favorite book and a glass of wine from the on-site wine store, appropriately named Get Lit (which goes a long way in making up for the lack of creativity in the store name).

Last, but not least, Nantucket Island is the setting of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick . Melville didn’t visit Nantucket until long after he wrote the book, but the island has a great whaling museum, some interesting walking tours that include the literary history, and a fabulous summer book festival in June.

5. Amsterdam, Netherlands

Amsterdam was the home of one of the most endearing characters in human history. A little Jewish girl, known as Anne Frank, spent the last years of her “freedom” in an attic apartment, where she thoroughly detailed her daily life in hiding in her childhood diary. The Diary of Anne Frank is enlightening, endearing, and immensely heartbreaking and possibly one of the most-read non-fiction works of the 20th century. Visitors can tour the Anne Frank House to see firsthand where Anne penned her now-famous memoirs.

Aside from its literary importance, Amsterdam has a thriving arts scene. Check out the best of van Gogh, the classics of the Rijksmuseum, and the masters of street art in Moco Museum on our “ Amsterdam’s Art Scene ” scavenger hunt!

6. Bath, England

Not only is Bath home to one of the finest representations of an ancient Roman bath complex, one of the most beautiful abbeys in the world, and the culinary masterpiece known as Sally Lunn’s buns, but it is also the elegant stomping ground of Jane Austen.

Austen lived in the ancient health mecca from 1801 to 1809 and wrote Persuasion and Northanger Abbey . Your first stop should be the Jane Austen Centre to explore multiple exhibits on her life and work. In mid-September, Bath hosts the Jane Austen Festival featuring walking tours, plays, a ball, and readings from the works of the famous female author. In late September, bring the kiddos for the Children’s Bath Literature Festival!

7. Edinburgh, Scotland

Staying within the UK, we head up north to captivating Scotland. Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and a fabulous city for historical and literary tours. The city was home to JK Rowling during many of the years she was creating her legendary wizarding series. Though it’s closed for now, you can see The Elephant House cafe, where she did much of her writing. You can tour Victoria Street, which many believe was one of the inspirations for Diagon Alley. Tour Greyfriars Cemetery, and look for familiar names from the novels, or hire a tour guide, and take a Harry Potter walking tour. Elsewhere in Scotland, you can see the spot where Hargrid’s hut was located in the movies in Glencoe, take a ride on the Hogwarts Train, and see Loch Shiel, or “The Black Lake.”

8. Paris, France

Paris is a literary legend. From the madness of the Da Vinci Code to Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables , Paris is the perfect backdrop for a romantic or torrid tale. At this moment (July 2023) though, riotous Paris resembles a scene from Les Mis a little too closely!

Pull up a chair in Les Deux Magots, where Hemingway sipped his coffee. Stop in the iconic bookstore Shakespeare and Co. Visit the museum Maison de Victor Hugo in the author’s former apartment. Or wander the tombs of Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise Cemetery. There are a plethora of literary walking tours , riverside bouquinistes, and adorable secondhand bookstores in the city to peruse.

Out of Africa is a fascinating memoir recounting the experiences of Danish author Karen Blixen on an African coffee plantation in the 1930s. Blixen wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, and she spent almost 20 years living amongst the locals of East Africa. The memoirs are a masterpiece of her experiences and an ode to the beautiful landscapes of Kenya. Kenya was also the birthplace of legendary African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, often considered East Africa’s leading novelist. Grab a few of his books, and let them inspire you to explore the beauty of East Africa.

10. San Juan, Puerto Rico

Kentucky-born author Hunter S. Thompson perfectly encapsulates the simultaneously vibrant and oft-tragic atmosphere of San Juan, Puerto Rico, in his novel The Rum Diary . While touring the historic Spanish Colonial forts, colorful alleyways, and stunning Caribbean beaches, allow the pages of Thompson’s masterpiece to guide your wanderlust!

11. Iceland

Iceland is known as the most bookish island in the world. Not only does it have the most books published per capita but the most writers and the most books read per capita as well. With a long history spanning the Viking sagas to today, the windswept wonder has captivated imaginations for centuries. The Snæfellsjökull volcano was the site of the gateway to the heart of the world in Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Aside from the volcano, literary travelers can visit The National and University Library of Iceland , where you can lay eyes on some of the most important historical works in the country. Every two years, Reykjavik hosts their International Literary Festival. The city invites Nobel-prize-winning novelists, historians, and poets to engage in a series of lectures and literary events in venues all over the city. It is accompanied by a writer’s seminar. The capital also has an app for a self-guided literary walking tour . Bookworms will also revel in the surfeit of quirky bookstores dotting the country.

12. Cartagena, Colombia

Cartagena was the home and muse of Nobel-Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. From One Hundred Years of Solitude to Love in the Time of Cholera , Márquez insists that every work of his has a link to the city that captured his heart. Cartagena is a lively city with a rich culture, fantastic food, and stunning beaches, making it a top-notch holiday destination. It was also home to the poet Luis Carlos López. While most of the sites related to the life of Márquez are not yet open to the public, there are plans to turn his former home into a museum.

13. The Pacific Coast Trail, USA

Wild by Cheryl Strayed cemented the PCT in infamy… especially after it was turned into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon. The PCT is a hiking trail that roams from Mexico to Washington State, extending over 1,100 miles. Since the book’s publication in 2012, the PCT has exploded with visitors. There is now a permit system you must use to apply for a trek. This trail is long and difficult in spots and should not be undertaken without proper preparation. The Pacific Trail Association has designed several shorter hikes based on Cheryl’s journey, as well.

14. Verona, Italy

Tourists flock year after year to stare upon a tiny, unassuming balcony where legend holds that fair Juliet conversed with her Romeo. Romeo and Juliet is a timeless Shakespearean play based on a previous story written by Luigi da Porto, who (unlike Shakespeare) actually lived in Verona and based the story on his life. Not only is the town quite romantic, but for a small fee, lovers can reenact the famous scenes from the 13th-century balcony of the Capulet home. Travelers touch the statue of Juliet, see the bust of Shakespeare, visit Romeo’s house and Juliet’s tomb, or join one of the many walking tours.

For a fun outing, visit the Juliet Club, where letters to Juliet from all over the world are archived and answered. Verona was also the home of Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, for approximately seven years, and there are a couple of monuments to the legendary author in the city.

15. Stampede Trail, Alaska

When Jon Krakauer wrote Into the Wild , it’s doubtful he had any idea what effect it would have on the travel community. Though the protagonist endures a brutal death, the work of nonfiction, based on the life of Christopher McCandless, hasn’t stopped droves of hikers from attempting the Stampede Trail in an effort to visit the abandoned bus where McCandless lived and perished. After two deaths and several near-deaths, the bus was removed in 2020 to deter unprepared “pilgrims.” If you choose to take on the isolated trail, just outside of Denali National Park, proper preparation and advanced survival skills are highly recommended.

16. Tuscany, Italy

There is no place more romantic than Tuscany, Italy, and no better food on the planet, either. It’s no wonder that Frances Mayes chose it as the location of her female emancipation/romance novel Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy . Today, there are cooking tours, bus tours, and bike tours all based on the spots in the book and movie. Most are based out of Cortona, Siena, or Florence. While the movie was made in 2003 and the hype over it has faded, our love affair with Tuscany persists, partly due to the book and movie that introduced the region to so many travelers.

17. Transylvania, Romania

Transylvania’s misty forests and looming mountaintop castles made it the ideal setting for Bram Stoker’s Dracula . The local, ancient vampire lore and the acts of the infamous Vlad Dracul (Vlad the Impaler) didn’t hurt, either. Today, Bran Castle is touted as Dracula’s Castle, though it harbors no link to the book or to Vlad. It has an interesting tour with an informative museum, some vampire artifacts, and a slew of kitschy huts selling Dracula souvenirs. You can also visit the actual castle ruins of Vlad the Impaler, Poenari Castle.

18. St. Petersburg, Russia

We know—Russia isn’t the easiest to visit at the moment. Put this one away for future endeavors. St. Petersburg was home to legendary authors like Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mikhail Lermontov. It’s the setting of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a city devoted to the literature and art of Imperial Russia.

The apartment of Alexander Pushkin has been transformed into a literary museum. Volkovskoe Cemetery bears the headstones of some of Russia’s most loved writers. Dostoevsky Zone is a series of spots around Sennaya Square featured in the beloved novels of Dostoevsky. Make sure to grab a drink in the Stray Dog’s cellar, where all the Russian greats once gathered for poetry and music nights.

19. Dublin, Ireland

Ireland is another island with a strong literary heritage. Home to Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde, the Emerald Isle provides no shortage of fascinating fodder for both fictional and nonfictional works. Pop into the incredible library at Trinity College, where you will find the ninth-century illuminations of the Book of Kells. Visit the Museum of Literature . The James Joyce Centre offers literary lectures and walking tours. As in most of the great literary cities, watering holes were a favorite amongst angsty authors, and the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl tours will introduce you to the best of the best.

20. Mourne Mountains, Northern Ireland

Sticking to the Irish theme, many say that the mystical land of Narnia from C.S. Lewis’s beloved series Chronicles of Narnia was partially based on the beauty of Northern Ireland’s Mourne Mountains. Located in County Down, the mountains are the perfect escape after a few days in Dublin. A few scenes from Game of Thrones have been filmed here, as well.

21. Mainz, Germany

This destination isn’t so much inspired by a writer but an inventor that allowed us to enjoy the great works of our favorite authors with ease. Mainz was the home of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press and hero to bookworms the world over. Visit the Gutenberg Museum to learn the story and see one of the original Gutenberg Bibles, famously the first book printed on the new invention.

22. New York City, USA

Like Paris and London, NYC is a no-brainer on this list. It was the home of greats like Jack Kerouac, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Truman Capote, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, and Tennessee Williams. It’s the setting of countless works, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s , American Psycho , The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye , and countless others. It’s loaded with gorgeous libraries, iconic bookshops, and familiar literary spaces. Like Dublin, NYC is a great place for a literary pub crawl !

23. Monterey, California

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, near Monterey, California, and cities serve as the inspiration for his works like East of Eden and Cannery Row . Robert Louis Stevenson was also inspired to write Treasure Islan d from his home in Monterey. Tour The Robert Louis Stevenson House, where he wrote The Old Pacific Capital. Tour The Steinbeck House and the National Steinbeck Center, and check out the actual Cannery Row.

24. Middlebury, Vermont

Last, but definitely not least, check out the alluring home of Robert Frost. Wander the woods in Green Mountain National Forest that inspired Frost along the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. Let your mind wander as you snack on a to-go lunch at the Frost Wayside Picnic Area. Take a journey down the gorgeous Robert Frost Memorial Drive. Attend one of the most prestigious writer’s conferences in the country, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Take a tour of Middlebury College for an afternoon reading in one of its libraries, or let your mind be blown by the mega collection of works in Monroe Street Books.

Closing Thoughts

For the consummate bookworm, there’s nothing like escaping to a faraway land in the pages of a classic book. Many of our favorite TV shows, movies, and video games are copied from the lines of beloved literary works, and now, even your travel itinerary can be planned around your favorite stories. We hope you enjoyed this list of literary travel destinations. While these are some of the best, we guarantee whoever your favorite author is, you can design a trip around the places they lived and wrote in. Put on your thinking cap and get creative as you plan your next trip around your literary hero. Peace out, fellow nerds!

For more travel inspiration, check out our travel guide, “ What is Set Jetting? The Top Travel Trend for Movie Buffs .”

Literary travelers are just one small section of the travel universe! Check out “ 31 Types of Travelers: Which One Are You? ” to find out what type of travel you will love the most!

Frequently Asked Questions

Literary travel constitutes planning a vacation around a destination that has a connection to a prominent literary work or writer. It gives you the chance to bring a book to life.

Literary tourism involves several areas of travel, including walking tours based on important spots in the lives of writers, settings of great works, historic bookshops, and literary museums.

The literary capitals of the world are probably Iceland , London , Paris , and New York City . Since so many great authors lived there, these all make excellent literary travel destinations !

Destination literature is quite simply choosing what book you will read based on your vacation destination. For instance, if you’re visiting Ireland , you may choose to read The Dubliners on the trip.

Transylvania , Romania; Paris , France; Verona , Italy; and Edinburgh , Scotland, are popular places for travel based on books . You can visit Dracula’s castle or Juliet’s balcony!

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History of the grand tour .

In the early years of the 18th and 19th centuries it was fashionable, for wealthy British families, to send their son and heir on a tour of Europe. A trip that was designed to introduce the young ‘ milord ‘ to the art, history and culture of Italy. The British educational system was based on Latin and Greek literature and philosophy. An educated person was taught the classics from a very early age. Whilst the original Grand Tourists were mostly male, there were a few enlightened families who sent their daughters to ‘the continent’ too. Aristocratic families regarded this journey to Europe as an opportunity to complete their education. The journey was known as the ‘Grand Tour’. The young gentlemen and a few ladies were often accompanied by a ‘learned guide’ a person who could act as a tutor and chaperone. These guides, usually highly educated, were known in Italian as ‘ cicerone’  and it was their job to explain the history, art and literature of Italy to their young charges.

A ‘Grand Tour’ generally included visits to Rome, Naples, Venice and Florence. On the journey south Geneva or Montreux in Switzerland were popular stopping off points too. Think Daisy Miller in Henry James novella of the same name. Wealthy families traversed Europe, often for months on end, absorbing every possible palace, party and picnic in the process. For many it was a very long and decadent party for others it was a necessary departure from their homeland until the dust of a divorce, bankruptcy or other social scandal had settled.

THE JOURNEY – Young gentlemen would make the journey south from The British Isles, either by ship or overland by horse and carriage. There are numerous reports of these young travellers being made chronically ill by travel sickness, rough seas and ‘foreign food’. In the 1730s and 1740s roads were rough and full of potholes, carriages could expect to cover a maximum of 15-20 miles per day. Highwaymen and groups of brigands often preyed on travellers, hoping to steal money and jewels. In the days of the ‘Grand Tour’ travel wasn’t for the faint-hearted .   Crossing the Alps was a particular challenge. Depending on the age and level of fitness of travellers, it may have been necessary to hire a sedan chair to be carried, literally, by strong local men over various Alpine passes. In fact the ‘chairmen of Mont Cenis’ close to Val d’Isere were known throughout the Alps for their strength and dexterity. These ‘chair carriers’ worked in pairs and groups of four, six or even eight men – they physically carried the ‘Grand Tourists’ over the Alps.

TRAVELLING – Having endured a crossing of the Alps the young ‘milordi’ would head to Milan or Turin where the local British consulate would offer a warm welcome. However,  the really attractive destinations were further away, particularly Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples. These cities were renowned for their entertainment, lavish parties and sense of fun. There’s a fantastic cartoon, by David Allen (above) showing a young aristocrat arriving in Piazza di Spagna, Rome. His carriage is instantly surrounded by local touts, street performers, actors and actresses, all anxious to separate young ‘Algernon’ from his trunk full of cash! It’s interesting to remember that the Italians have been welcoming tourists to their lands for centuries. They’ve learned a thing or two about helping newly arrived foreigners!

VENICE – In Venice the British Consul Joseph Smith was an art collector and supporter of local artists. Smith lived in a small palace on the Grand Canal, filled with paintings, art, books and coins. He was patron of Canaletto, probably the most famous and popular Venetian painter of his day. Canaletto painted ‘vedute’ scenes of Venice. Every Grand Tourist wanted to leave with a Canaletto painting as a souvenir of the Grand Tour. Smith’s art collection was so impressive that a young King George III purchased the entire collection in 1762, when he was himself on the Grand Tour. So Joseph Smith’s art collection became the basis of the British ‘Royal Collection’ of art much of which can still be seen at Buckingham Palace or in the National Gallery, London today. Whilst in Venice the young Grand Tourists would attend concerts, visit churches and wherever possible attend a ball or two. Venice at Carnival time was a particular fascination – an opportunity to put on a mask and be whoever you wanted to be!

A typical Grand Tour of Europe could last up to two years and would always include several months staying in each city visited.

Florence was popular for its renaissance art, magnificent country villas and gardens, whilst Rome was essential for proper, classical, ancient ruins. Venice was the party city, especially at the time of Carnival. Naples was regarded as the home of archaeology, excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum began in the 1730s and Vesuvius was quite active at this time. Plumes of volcanic gases and occasional lava flows would illuminate the mountain after dark. The Grand Tourists would position themselves on the lower slopes of the volcano to watch the nightly spectacle.

IN ROME – many of the Grand Tourists funded excavation work in and around the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. Many of the Grand Tourists wanted to acquire a Roman statue or sculpture to take home as a souvenir. There were numerous stonemasons working in and around the basement of the Colosseum, creating modern and ‘antique’ marble sculptures. Even in the 18th century demand exceeded supply in the ‘genuine Roman sculpture market’. Many Grand Tourists left for home with an ‘original’ antique Roman statue, which years later, under expert examination turned out to be a fake! The artist Panini painted several imaginary compositions of young Grand Tourists surrounded by paintings of Roman buildings and ruins. Each of the ‘ruins’ in the paintings was based on an actual Roman building. For example, in the painting below The Pantheon is clearly visible just to the right of the two standing gentlemen. Above the Pantheon is the Colosseum. On the left of the painting above the two seated gentlemen the Roman arches of Constantine and Septimius Severus can be seen.

Roma Antica – by Giovanni Paolo Pannini c. 1754 – Stuttgart Art Museum

The Grand Tour inspired many travellers to take a greater interest in Roman history and art. The study of archaeology was born at this time with extensive excavations taking place in Pompeii, Herculaneum and in the area of the Roman Forum in Rome. The British School at Rome was established to learn more about the Roman ruins and to fund excavations. The School still exists today. Below is another painting by Pannini showing the wonders of Modern Rome (1750s) – featuring details of Baroque fountains, palaces and elegant piazzas. These exceptionally detailed paintings effectively catalogue the ‘ancient marbles’ discovered in Italy by the middle years of the 18th century.

NAPLES – for fun and excitement on the Grand Tour was very popular. Lord Hamilton, British Ambassador in Naples was a wonderful host and put on spectacular parties and musical evenings. His second wife Emma Hamilton would dress in Roman and Greek style clothing and perform a series of ‘Attitudes’ where guests had to guess her identity. It was here at the Hamilton residence that Emma attracted the attention of Lord Nelson, British naval hero of the day, and they became lovers.

Meanwhile Vesuvius , the volcano that dominates the Bay of Naples was having an active phase in the 1760s and 1770s, most days steam could be seen rising from the crater and frequently, especially after nightfall, streams of glowing lava could be observed. Lord Hamilton wrote several articles on Vesuvius and the lava flows that he witnessed. Many visiting painters were inspired to paint Vesuvius and the surrounding area. The science of vulcanology was in its infancy. The spectacle that Vesuvius offered visitors most nights must have seemed quite extraordinary to the early Grand Tourists – typically away from home in strange and different lands for the first time.

From Naples it was relatively easy to arrange transport on a British ship back to England. So Naples was a popular end point for the 18th century Grand Tour. The young aristocrats would board a ship bound for England and assuming no rough seas they’d be home within a few weeks. Typically they’d have extensive luggage including marble statues and friezes from Rome, paintings and glassware from Venice, even lava samples and pumice stone from Naples . All these souvenirs would be displayed with great pride in the family home. The impact on British country houses of the Grand Tour can still be seen today. Almost every stately home in Britain has several paintings by Canaletto, commissioned during the Grand Tour. Many stately homes have a sculpture gallery, often specially built to accommodate the Roman statues and marble work brought back from the Grand Tour.

In a sense the Grand Tour was the start of modern tourism, it was a journey taken to learn and experience new and different styles of art, architecture and culture. A journey designed to understand and learn about Europe. The Grand Tour was a couple of years enjoying the best that Europe (especially Italy) had to offer. Parties, ladies, fine food and wine – and family members at a distance – a letter from mama or papa would take weeks to arrive. The young aristocrats had freedom, fun, sun and souvenirs. What finer way to complete a young gentleman’s education. Head home with a sack full of souvenirs and a full and varied experience of life – this was escapism at its best!

• ‘Milordi’ is a term referring to aristocratic men, literally meaning ‘my lords’. In the days of the Grand Tour the term ‘milordi’ was an ironic and satirical way of referring to young, aristocratic men, travelling in Europe with (generally speaking) more money than sense.
• Cicerone or bear-leader  was a popular term for a man who escorted young men of rank or wealth on their travels on the  Grand Tour . The role of cicerone or bear-leader blended elements of  tutor, chaperone and companion. These tutor-companions were often hired to keep the young ‘milordi’ out of trouble and to ensure that they didn’t do anything to embarrass their families. The name Cicerone originally comes from ‘Cicero’ referring to the famous Roman orator, politician, thinker and writer., who lived from 106-43 BC.

Many of London’s museums have exceptional collections of Italian and Greek paintings and sculptures as a result of the Grand Tour. The National Gallery has an amazing collection: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art/paintings-in-depth/the-grand-tour

• I’ve written about Herculaneum at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD.
• I’ve also written other articles about Naples and Herculaneum:
• Herculaneum – a very bright future…..
• Naples, A Crazy Prince and fantastic pizza…
• To learn more about unique travel opportunities and tailor-made journeys check out our sister web site:  Grand Tourist  for ideas and examples of exceptional travel experiences.
• The picture at the top of this article (reproduced below) is by German 19th century painter Carl Spitzweg. It is a wonderful, and humorous portrayal of earnest English tourists soaking in the atmosphere at a ruined temple site (it could be Paestum, south of Naples). Although I think it might be Agrigento, Sicily. The artist has captured the mood of the ‘Grand Tourists’, just look carefully at the characters!

Herculaneum, Roman seaside town, buried by eruption of Vesuvius 79 AD (left). Map (right) shows areas excavated by 1908

• NOTE: Journeys in Europe are designed by our sister company www.grand-tourist.com drop us a line to discuss your perfect grand tour.
• Written: 23-11-17
• Updated: 15-11-20 / 10-01-2022 / 10-12-2023

#grandtour #grandtourist #educatedtraveller #archaeology

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30 thoughts on “ History of the Grand Tour  ”

• Pingback: What Was the Grand Tour? – Kat Devitt

Thank you for including my article in your list. I am fascinated by the Grand Tour – possibly Adam Smith’s decision to leave his post and become a private tutor, meandering around Europe, was not such an unusual one. Certainly the Italian cities of Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples were filled with eager ‘tourists’ anxious to learn and often to finance restoration of ancient buildings. It must have been a very interesting time.

Absolutely amazing piece. Thank you for providing such interesting information!

Like Liked by 1 person

Thank you Natalia x

Thanks for linking to my ‘History of the Grand Tour’. Curiously I too was an undergraduate at Oxford, although not one of the drunken ones. Were you a Rhodes or a Fulbright Scholar? The authors who wrote for the original Grand Tourists were people like John Murray and Baedeker. In fact you couldn’t call yourself a serious ‘tourist’ without a small red volume of either writer tucked under your arm!

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Hello Miss Onion – thanks for finding my blog. Please can you put the source as educated-traveller.com Thank you. Also the book about the Grand Tour is by Brian Dolan (Katie Hickman just wrote a review) If you want a little more background on the Grand Tour just ask – I run a travel business called Grand Tourist as well as writing my blog! Have a good day.

• Pingback: Venice – happy to be back… – The Educated Traveller

Excellent, enjoyably breezy summary of a very important 18th century phenomenon, really enjoyed it, thank you.

Hi Arran – thank you so much for this kind comment. I’m delighted you enjoyed my summary!

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So THIS is where the name for your tour company originated! I feel like a GRAND TOURIST when I’m traveling with you, Janet–learning as I travel just like the folks from centuries ago! Thanks for this terrific background article!

I was going to say the same as Mary Lou Peters, and congratulate you on your four bears (Darn that predictive text – I had actually dictated “congratulate you on your forebears”!) – A truly riveting and informative article – superb reading – thank you so much for that!

Thank you John – appreciated!

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Taylor Swift Drops ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’ Music Video With ‘Eras Tour’ Backstage Footage

Taylor Swift offered fans a glimpse at what goes on behind the scenes of the Eras Tour in her “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” music video.

The pop star, 34, premiered the new video at the conclusion of her final show at Wembley Stadium in London on Tuesday, August 20, which marked the end of the European leg of the Eras Tour . After concertgoers got a first look at the venue, the video was released on YouTube at 6 p.m. ET.

Fans have been clamoring for a peek behind the curtain of the Eras Tour ever since it kicked off in March 2023, and Swift finally showed them with never-before-seen footage from backstage and rehearsals. The video saw her rolling around on a scooter and jumping on a mat underneath the stage, hiding in the infamous cleaning cart, trying on costumes, practicing her vocals and learning choreography with her backup dancers in a studio.

“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is the second music video from The Tortured Poets Department following the premiere of “Fortnight” with Post Malone in April shortly after the debut of Swift’s 11th album. She released “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” — which is seemingly based on Swift’s experience carrying on with her Eras Tour performances despite previous turmoil in her personal life — as the record’s second single in July.

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Though fans did not get the Reputation (Taylor’s Version) announcement that they speculated was in the cards on Tuesday — which marked the singer’s 131st Eras concert, IYKYK — Swift’s final London concert was filled with surprises, including special guests and unexpected debuts.

Related: The Most Viral Moments From Taylor Swift's 'The Eras Tour' So Far

Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine joined Swift for their first live performance of their duet, “Florida!!!,” during the Tortured Poets Department segment of the show. Swift’s longtime producer Jack Antonoff then appeared on stage for the first song of the acoustic section, a mashup of “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and “Getaway Car.” Swift described the tracks from Lover and Reputation , respectively, as two of her and Antonoff’s favorites that they have worked on together. Swift then sang “So Long, London” for the first time during the tour as her second acoustic song.

Prove You’re the Ultimate Fan of Taylor Swift With Your ‘Eras Tour’ Knowledge

Swift now has a two-month break in her touring schedule. She will resume her concerts in North America in October, performing in Miami, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Toronto and Vancouver. Swift confirmed during her 100th Eras show in June that the tour will end in Canada in December.

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Taylor Swift

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Taylor Swift’s Opening Act Maisie Peters Seemingly Responded After Her Eras Tour Performance Was Cruelly Mocked

“Feel so bad for maisie because she achieved her dream of opening for taylor only to have haters ruin it,” one person tweeted.

BuzzFeed Staff

On Monday, British singer Maisie Peters fulfilled her childhood dream when she performed in front of 90,000 people as an opener for Taylor Swift .

Maisie took to the stage before Taylor’s other support act, Paramore , on the seventh London date of her record-breaking Eras Tour. 

When Maisie’s appearance was announced earlier this month, the 24-year-old star could not contain her joy as she wrote on Instagram: “Supporting taylor swift has been my dream since i was 12 years old and watched the love story music video for the first time.”

She added at the time: “It is such an honour to be part of something so special and iconic and i already know im gonna have the time of my life :’) thank u dr @taylorswift . SCREAM !!!!!”

Then, on Sunday night, Maisie shared a video of herself being too excited to sleep ahead of the career high. This excitement continued to be palpable all through Monday, with Maisie documenting her rehearsal.

Sharing photos from the Eras Tour stage, she wrote : “Eras i’ll see u at 4:55 if i don’t pass out from excitement before then 🫶🫶🫶🫶”

And after the show, Maisie posted two  photos  of herself with Taylor alongside pictures of her performance, writing: “Long live 😭✨🤍 thank you @taylorswift for everything, forever <3”

She added in a separate post : “I got to live my dream last night at the eras tour, and i don’t think i’ll ever get over it :’))))) seeing so many of u singing in the crowd made my heart BURST, and then getting to scream every lyric at my first ever taylor swift show after (!!!! can u believe it!!!) was literally the most magic i’ve ever experienced.”

“It was exactly as i hoped it would be except better,” Maisie added. “I met my hero and i haven’t stopped smiling since. IDK HOW IT GETS BETTER THAN THIS FR <3333”

However, Maisie’s night was seemingly tarnished when she faced widespread mockery for a clip that she posted from her Eras Tour performance.

In the clip, Maisie has slightly altered the lyrics to one of her biggest songs, “Lost the Breakup,” to: “You say: ‘Wow, hey, it’s been forever, you want to get a drink, like, together?’ / I say: ‘I’m kinda busy, like, I’m with Taylor tonight!’ / No shit, I won the breakup .” 

The star captioned the video: “I just performed at the eras tour … if that’s not winning the breakup idk what is,” also adding: “That was so surreal eras wow thank u sm i’ll never recover from how special that was :’)))))”

However, the video did not land as anticipated, and Maisie’s vocals faced incredibly harsh criticism in the comments of her posts on both Instagram and TikTok . 

Somebody else then posted the clip to X alongside the shady caption : “Is this serious?!? 😭😭😭,” where it quickly gained traction from people who were quick to join in with the ridicule. 

Others leaped to Maisie’s defense, pointing out that this particular part of her song isn’t actually sung in the recording, it is spoken dialogue. They also said it is understandable that Maisie may have been nervous performing in front of so many people as the opener for her favorite artist.

“Why is everyone so mean 😭” one person commented on Maisie’s Instagram post. “We have seen Maisie live before and she sounds amazing! 🫶🏼 She clearly must’ve been nervous and SO SHE DAMN SHOULD BE we would be too if we were singing in front of Taylor on her tour HELP! ❤️”

“To all the people hating...did YOU just play the eras tour? no. you didn't. SHE DID 🥰” somebody else added.

And Maisie herself alluded to the backlash on her Instagram story, where she poignantly shared a screenshot of Taylor’s song “ Mean .”

For context, Taylor is believed to have  written this song in response to music critic Bob Lefsetz giving her February 2010 performance with Stevie Nicks a cruel review. 

In the review, Lefsetz claimed that Taylor couldn’t sing and, in a quote that aged particularly badly, that the performance has “shortened her career.”

Writing on her website after “Mean’s” release, Taylor said: “I get it that not everyone is going to like everything that you do, and I get that no matter what, you’re going to be criticized for something. But I also get that there are different kinds of ways to criticize someone. There is constructive criticism. There’s professional criticism. And then, there’s just being mean.”

In the song, Taylor sings: “You can take me down / With just one single blow / But you don't know what you don't know / Someday, I'll be living in a big old city / And all you're ever gonna be is mean / Someday, I'll be big enough so you can't hit me / And all you're ever gonna be is mean.”

She later adds: “I can see you years from now in a bar / Talking over a football game / With that same big loud opinion / But nobody's listening / Washed up and ranting about the same old bitter things / Drunk and grumbling on about how I can't sing / But all you are is mean”

Needless to say, it didn’t take long for Maisie’s followers to connect the song's meaning to her current situation, and many were left heartbroken that she had been made to feel this way.

“Maisie posting ‘mean’ to her story 24 hours after she had the biggest gig of her career because some of y’all are rancid cretins who can’t keep your mouths shut for 0.2 seconds is actually so upsetting,” one popular tweet reads .

“Maisie should not have to post mean on her story a day after the best day of her career i hate all of you,” somebody else wrote . 

Another added : “I saw this story and feel so bad for maisie because she achieved her dream of opening for taylor only to have haters ruin it. my heart hurts so bad for her.”

Still, Maisie seemed keen to put any upset behind her, and immediately followed up her “Mean” screenshot with a selfie and a caption about her return to supporting Noah Kahan on his UK tour.

She wrote: “Anyway birmingham see u in half an hour!!! so excited to be back on the noah tour w u all, who’s gonna sing w me.”

We love you, Maisie! ❤️

Topics in this article

• Taylor Swift
• Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
• Maisie Peters