All readers who have experienced in their life a sense of wanderlust and the call for the exotic, will love this travel notebook of a woman who made travel a fulfilling destiny.
The Italian writer, Dacia Maraini, opens her book with a reflection on the human fascination for the exotic, suggesting that it derives from a love of the different, “the seduction of elsewhere”.
Her desire for travel started when she was a child, instilled by her parents, whose wanderlust took her to live in Japan when she was one year old.
The travel itineraries recounted take us from the Africa of savannas and slums to Europe with its variety of ancient and more modern traditions, passing through the Orient destroying its roots, the U.S. dreams of glory, and the cities of South America that preserve a precious past.
This book deepens and explores the theme of the exotic throughout her life, and her journeys of inner and world discovery. Dacia Maraini since childhood has been trained by her parents to move from place to place, and to immerse herself in distant cultures, coming into contact with and confronting new philosophies of life, new forms of spirituality, investigating the relationships between near and far countries, and illuminating them with new visions, in their aspects of light and shadow.
A capturing book that brings the reader on a journey marked by a constant passion for elsewhere, as a place that we caress in the imagination, following endless curiosity about places and people.
As she defines with her words… “Certainly exoticism is provoked by a devious and prolonged seduction. Something that evokes, through insistent dreaming, a place one imagines extraordinary and happy. A place one caresses in imagination, with dazzled senses, and a subtle enjoyment that touches the bowels… I was lucky enough to experience what the feeling of the exotic was…”
Enjoy the booktrailer realized by Alessia Simonetti, JUMP team.
