or: why does this blog exist, exactly?
Good question. There are already several hundred thousand travel blogs on the internet, written mostly by people younger, more photogenic, and better at TikTok than I am. The world does not need another one. So, here we are. Welcome.
This blog exists because at some point I realized that almost everything written online about the places I care about ranges from “factually wrong” to “technically correct but written by someone who clearly spent six hours there and read a Wikipedia page on the train back”. I figured I could do at least slightly better, mostly by being slower, more obsessive, and significantly less photogenic. I will let you judge whether that worked out.
Who I am, approximately
Italian. Introvert. Scuba diver. Compulsive reader. Photographer of moderate skill, which I will admit before someone else does. I write in English, which is not my first language, so occasionally a sentence will land in a slightly Joe Pesci kind of way. I have made peace with this. So should you.
I am the kind of person who stands in front of a Bernini sculpture for forty minutes, which is roughly thirty-eight minutes longer than is socially acceptable. I am the kind of person who, when a famous Roman restaurant serves a bad carciofo alla giudia, writes about it for two thousand words instead of leaving a one-star review and moving on. These are not necessarily good qualities. But they are the qualities that produced this blog, so we work with what we have.
What this blog is about
Art. Mostly Italian, because I was born here and it would be wasteful not to use the advantage. Frescoes, sculpture, mosaics, the occasional Byzantine detour. I try to explain what makes a work interesting without assuming you already know, and without explaining things you probably do already know. This is a difficult balance and I sometimes get it wrong in both directions.
Food. Reviewed honestly, with a numeric score I am willing to defend in court if necessary. Some of the most famous restaurants in Rome get middling scores. Some unknown trattorias get high ones. This makes nobody happy except the readers, who are the only people I am trying to make happy.
Diving. The real kind, decompression and GPS locators and currents, not the kind where you swim with allegedly friendly dolphins. If you are interested in this you already know what I mean.
Books, history, photography, ethology. The other things that wandered into my head and stayed. The categories of this blog accurately reflect my actual attention span, which is wide and not particularly disciplined. The connecting thread, perhaps imperceptible, is obviously travel itself: traveling to see art, traveling to see nature, traveling to eat, traveling to photograph, traveling to see wonderful underwater worlds, and reading about all of it.
What it is not about
Top 10 lists. Hidden gems that appear on the first page of Google. Itineraries that promise to cover Rome in 24 hours. Sponsored content. Restaurants where I ate for free in exchange for kind words. Influencer collaborations. Beach resorts. The phrase “vibrant local culture”. Sunsets, generally.
On being politically incorrect
The footer of this blog has, for years, described it as “politically incorrect”. At the practical level, in the context of this blog, this means very little: I will tell you that a famous restaurant is not good, that the Statue of Liberty in person is somewhat less moving than the postcards, that the Sistine Chapel visited in ten minutes with three thousand other people standing under it cannot really be seen at all. I will use the term “tourist trap” without inverted commas. That is all, at the operational level.
At a more general level, however, I do have a position, and it is worth declaring. Political correctness is an insidious toxin that has spread across the Western world over the past fifty years; the dominant narrative presents it as a commendable advance of humanity toward what is weak and defenseless, but I, having studied it at length, am convinced it is a dystopian and quasi-fascist drift, whose hidden aim is the fueling of social conflict, and which above all gravely damages every form of culture and thought. And since here I try, in my small way, to share culture and stimulate reflection, I try to do it in the way I believe most fruitful and necessary, that is to say, in a politically incorrect way.
Does adhering to a politically incorrect register make me a reactionary? If anyone, conditioned by ideology to think in binary categories, should think so, I will be pleased to disappoint them.
Who this is for
People who would rather understand one fresco than photograph ten. People who suspect, correctly, that most travel content is written without much intellectual investment. People who find a 4000 word ramble on Masaccio’s perspective more useful than a list of things to do in Florence in a weekend. People not easily pleased by a shallow scratch of the surface, which is my favorite phrase about this project and probably the closest thing to a tagline.
If that sounds like you, hello. If it does not, I do not blame you, and I wish you a pleasant time elsewhere on the internet.
Why ArtAtlas exists alongside this blog
The blog is the slow part: the essays, the reviews, the obsessive paragraphs about the way light falls on a marble shoulder. ArtAtlas, which is a separate project of mine, is the fast part: you tell it a city and your interests, it gives you an itinerary. They share the same opinions about what is worth seeing and what is not. If reading a post here makes you want to actually go somewhere, ArtAtlas is the tool that gets you there without sending you to the places I would have written a thousand words against.
A final disclaimer
Everything on this blog is one person’s opinion. I am wrong sometimes. I have changed my mind about restaurants, about cities, about whole categories of art. I will probably change it again. If you find a factual mistake, write to me and I will fix it. If you find an opinion you disagree with, that is what opinions are for. If you find both in the same post, congratulations on a thorough reading.
Now have a look around. There are 243 stories. Some of them are even good.
— TheIntroverTraveler