Travel writing is a major genre. Go into any bookshop and see the vast array of travel writings aimed to appeal to every type and taste. There are food travel books for food enthusiasts, historical travelogues for the historians, humorous travel books for the irreverent, and every other imaginable slant on travel. But where did this interest in the travels of others begin?
One of the earliest European travel accounts, where the writer traveled for the sake of travel and wrote about it afterwards was written, oddly enough, not during the heydays of Greece or Rome but in the year 1336 A.D. Petrarch, an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists — the man credited with perfecting the sonnet and making it one of the most perfect art forms to date — climbed Mount Ventoux and wrote about it afterwards. It was a climb that resulted in far more than just the view he described or his account of the satisfaction of reaching the top. He introduced an entire new activity to humanity: travel writing.
True to the genre as well, Petrarch was critical of his fellow travelers or, in this case, those who refused to accompany him. He described...
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