And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, go.

The words 'forse che si,' 'forse che no', 'perhaps yes,' 'perhaps no,' repeat along all paths.

Martin Buber said, 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.

But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your...

He said he couldn't understand a world 'shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God's artistic genius.

Behind sunglasses we linger over espresso, talking about pizza as an art form, the geekiness of people's travel clothes...

Always, I liked the infinitive 'to go.' Let's go, let's go. let's really go. 'Andare' was the first verb I learned to conjugate in Italian. 'Andiamo,' let's go, teh sound comes out at a gallop.

If I lived here,...I have a feeling this place would take me.

There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake with lyrical headaches.

Italy's siren call lures us more and more.

There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.

Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full or choice, free to visit the stately pleasure domes, make love in the morning, sketch a bell tower, read a history of Byzantium, stare...

Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me...

All afternoon in the deck chair, I try to describe to my notebook the colors of the water and sky. How to translate sunlight into words?

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. The breeze lifting a...

The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.

Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk, set in Cairo, a