Travel at Home Challange

After being in my apartment for nearly three weeks, I have been thinking about Italy lately. It's not only because I have watched Italians battle the pandemic, and have seen time and again how resilient and creative people can indeed be during a crisis - but also because Italy is where my heart and mind go whenever I am longing for travel. In fact, I have been convincing my friends to buy a piece of land and build something in the next decade or so.

As a young college graduate, I took a driving trip from Austria to Italy and Croatia among half-dozen other countries. But Italy was something else. It felt like a real home away from home. There, I explored ancient tombs, learned ow to drink samba a con la Mosca, even dreamt in Italian for the first time (I don't speak Italian). Since then, I have not returned to Italy, but with friends or without them, I'll go build my tiny house with a farm. Now just need to convince my wife.  

Now that we are all staying home - for the time being, it doesn't mean we cannot revisit our favorite places in the world. That's why I'm going to launch a new type of book club, my first ever book club, with a theme. Each month, I will ask my book club members to pick a classic or contemporary book from a diverse range of voices; all stories will be deeply rooted somehow in a place.  

For the first book, why don't' we all travel to my true home away from home. Italy - surprise! A Room with a View by EM Forster. (It is free on Amazon). I hope this book brings us happiness to our days out home. The title alone is relevant: We are all stuck in a room, with a view - even if we live in Brooklyn in a tiny apartment with the view of our neighbors' balconies, or a little backyard. Yes, we can all change the stay-at-home challenge to travel at-home challenge.  

I hope you all join or start your own travel at-home challenge. Let me begin our journey with a few questions about A Room with a View.

•  What aspects of travel are the same in A Room with a View as they are today, during our virus outbreak, which is more than 100 years later?
• Have you met someone while traveling who changed the trajectory of your life?
• How do you think these characters might be different or perhaps similar in a 2020 version of the story?​

Let's do this!