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According to what I gathered at Wikipedia, the extensive voyage that Mark Twain, then age 32, took aboard the pleasure cruiser ‘Quaker City�� took about five months. I was surprised about that relatively short time period because when reading about all those sights and extensive excursions you feel that it must have taken such a longer period of time. To me, it felt like the journey must have taken at least a year. All 65 passengers on board had never been to Europe before. In contrast, the Europeans had only seen an occasional American now and then, so the Americans themselves were considered quite a sight as well.

Mark Twain was sponsored by a local newspaper in exchange for travel newsletters which the paper then published. These travel letters were later compiled into the travelogue ‘The Innocents Abroad��.

The excursions inland all along the Mediterrean coast from Gibraltar to Egypt sometimes took Mark Twain and his small group of ship companions of about 6 people weeks away from the port where the ship was docked. I suppose it was a try-out of a new form of tourist travel where the participants stayed on the same vessel and thus were provided with accommodation aboard for the whole journey with quite a choice of optional excursions organized into the countries where the ship docked at that time. These excursions would sometimes take weeks and seemed to have been organized very professionally with train and hotel reservations to whatever the American tourists desired to see. Twain and his small group took a long trip to Paris, returned to the ship and subsequently docked again in Genoa, then took a train to Milan, on to Venice and subsequently to Florence and Rome, where they boarded their ship again to travel to the East.

I must confess that I have never read a Mark Twain novel before and I do not think I will in the future. I might consider one of his other travelogues, as I have two volumes of ‘A Tramp Abroad��. Mark Twain was a very witty writer and when the mood took him he wrote in a very beautiful style. However, I thought he was often quite unbearably grumpy and insulting and I was surprised that he felt no restriction to ventilate it in public and in writing. Granted, his insults were sometimes quite hilarious, but often quite demeaning. His likes and dislikes seemed to me to have no rational ground. Some cities he loved, like Paris, Venice and Istanbul, but lots of others he hated for no reason I could discern. And how about being always very demeaning to the local tourist guides hired, even getting so far to gang up with his little group of young men to purposely not listen to a guide who was showing them another world famous painting, thereby looking the other way and acting like they did not know who Michelangelo was. He hated most of Italy and by the time his group arrived in Rome he declared he did not want to see another Raffael or Michelangelo ever again. Hated to see the Vatican, in fact hated the whole city. Throughout Italy, he showed his loathing when seeing the poverty and destitution of the crowds in the streets, especially in Naples, and he continued to ventilate that notion on his future trips east, coming to a climax in Syria and Palestine where he remarks that the people are so degenerated that they seem to be walking skeletons and the only sound they can make is asking for bakshees. Well, the novel was written more than 150 years ago, but still I felt very uncomfortable to read his ranting remarks.

I could go into details about all the sites Twain visited, but the list is long. I am only glad and relieved to report that in the end he was smitten with Egypt, the pyramids and the Sphinx because I would have taken it very seriously against him if he had nasty remarks about those ancient sites. I feared for the worst, seeing how he had abhorred Palestine, all the so-called holy sites and was not impressed by Jerusalem.

Don’t get me wrong, I certainly enjoyed to read the reports of his excursions, as it was very interesting to hear in what condition the sites were in 1867 as I have seen most of the places he visited, except for the Crimea and Syria. This proved to be a travelogue like no other and you will surely remember having read what he told about it when seeing the places yourself in this day and age.