The Art of Travel, revisited

My newspaper of choice has a triplet of travelling literature related articles (all in German, of course) in its weekend supplement which reminds me very much of The Art of Travel. I wonder why they have that now ...

The first one is a detailed and well written assessment of the different approaches of Leslie Stephens & John Ruskin in appraising the Swiss mountains. It is also a very instructive confirmation of how instrumental English Victorians were in laying the foundations of Swiss tourism, if not philanthropic development assistance to Swiss farmers (that's the Swiss government's job nowadays) through his Guild of St. George, although I have been unable to find confirmation of that trust's Switzerland related origins.

The next one describes the semi-autobiographical background of Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Now, I wonder whether it's just a coïncidence that the hero of Harold and Maude is called the way he is?

Solvitur ambulando, at last. Here, the author reviews the German edition of Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, an account of his epic walking journey from London to Istanbul (or Constantinople, as he seems to prefer to call it) that took him almost one and a half year until March 1935. I think I'll have to read that work in progress!