Passenger's List

My first morning on the Aegean Odyssey I woke up to find Capri outside my window. The great cliff rising from the sea reminded me of the cover of Shirley Hazzard’s memoir, Greene on Capri.

Photo Credit: Everett Collection

The fact that the island made me think of Graham Greene meant that I was on the right ship. Months earlier the cruise company Voyages to Antiquity had mailed to me, along with the standard packet of information on dining rooms and dress codes, a recommended reading list. I had taken seven Caribbean cruises and never once received a reading list. This one included, among other titles, Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens (the cruise was starting in Rome and visiting Sicily and Dalmatia before ending in Venice), The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard, Sicilian Carousel by Lawrence Durrell, and The Leopard, Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic novel of the coming unification of Italy as viewed by a world-weary aristocrat in Palermo.

Shortly after I boarded, I visited the ship’s library. The escapist fiction was shunted off to the side while sections on classical literature, history (shelves labeled Ancient Egypt, Byzantium, Roman Empire, Maritime), and travel took center stage. The last shelf held Nicolas Bouvier, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, Jan Morris,
Martha Gellhorn. Goethe’s Italian Journey was present, in English translation, and replacing Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence was Peter Mayne’s A Year in Marrakesh (a substitution which seemed to say everything you needed to know about the ship). Also here, in the same Eland series as Bouvier and Leigh Fermor, was David Gilmour’s The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.