Travel Trends: Literary Tours

Posted by Barbara Rogers Feb 21, 2007

And literary trails don’t end with visiting all the sites mentioned in the book. The Da Vinci Code trail led on to the Knights Templar trail, and travelers are now tracking down long-forgotten castles and chapels associated with these enigmatic knights.

Almost as wide-ranging geographically as the Knights Templar is the itinerary of Homer’s hero, Ulysses, in The Odyssey Entire Mediterranean cruises base their itineraries on the route Homer describes, right down to his last stop in Corfu, on his way home.

Travelers also delight in following in the footsteps of a favorite author, such as Ernest Hemingway, visiting the scenes and cities they immortalized, the hotels where they stayed, even the cafes they frequented.

Literary travel doesn’t have to follow a trail: it can be centered in one destination where a story unfolds, turning a city into a virtual theme park of fictional sites. Nowhere is this more true than in Verona, Italy, scene of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Wiley locals have obliged eager tourists by inventing a whole list of sites: Juliet’s House and balcony (constructed in the 1930s), her tomb (where visitors get a dose of culture as they proceed through a good museum of frescoes on their way to the apocryphal stone sarcophagus) and several works of art around the city that purport to mark locations of scenes from the play (unlikely, since Shakespeare never set foot here).

Other destinations are so filled with settings for fiction that they have literary trails of their own. Venice has been the setting for hundreds of works, not to mention the home of dozens of famous authors and poets. Entire city tours center on where they lived and where their characters walked or rode their gondolas. Most famous is perhaps Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, but even several modern whodunits have been set in its twisting passageways. Who could resist staging a chase scene there?