In Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes, Peter Furtado, historian and former editor of History Today magazine, has compiled an armchair travelers' delight. Building on the idea that cities are the most enduring of all historical artifacts, he presents travelers' accounts of 38 cities around the world, from Alexandria in Egypt to Washington, D.C.
Furtado outlines his selection criteria clearly for the reader. All the cities still exist: no romantic musings on the ruins of Persepolis or Machu Picchu are included. He does not use descriptions by a writer native to a city. For example, Furtado gives us Dickens's opinions of New York and Rome, but turns to writers from Switzerland, China, the United States (via France) and Germany for impressions of London. He does not draw on travel accounts later than the 1980s because he believes that cheap airfares and the Internet have fundamentally changed the experience of travel and travel writing. Within those criteria, he carefully chooses a range of sources from across the centuries and around the world: men and women, merchants, conquerors, explorers, pilgrims, journalists and monarchs. (Queen Victoria was mildly pleased with Paris.)
Even without entries from the last 30 years, Furtado gives the reader a complex picture of cities through time. Presented chronologically, the entries for each city function as a shaft in a literary archeological dig, allowing the reader to see both change and continuity in how a city is portrayed. The entries also give us an anecdotal history of travel itself, before the age of TripAdvisor and Google Earth. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins