Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide

by Douglas S. Mack

  Throughout the letters in 1967, my parents both spoke of seeing great “gleams”—their word for children. “I’ve decided that we’d make great parents—LATER!” Dad wrote in one letter. By 1975, “later” had come. In the weeks after my father left Europe, my mother started to feel a bit sick—especially in the mornings. Mom wrote a postcard to Dad from Trieste, Italy: “Today was the first time without nausea.… Please get info on pregnancy tests. You’ll love Venezia.” My sister, Elisabeth, was born in April 1976.

  My parents scrimped and saved, determined to travel together as a family as soon as possible. In 1980, the three of them—Mom, Dad, and four-year-old Elisabeth (note the French spelling)—went to Europe together. It was my parents’ first step in indoctrinating their children in the joys of travel, and though I wasn’t there, I certainly appreciate the broader significance of the trip. Nine months later, I was born. You do the math.

  If my goal in looking at the letters had been to distract myself from the frustrations of Venice, I’d succeeded. Sort of. I was now world-weary and lonely. And this, it turns out, is an even more miserable feeling than the lost and lonely sensation I’d felt in Florence a year earlier. It didn’t help that I had grouped the letters from Venice and Vienna together and was now realizing that these were apparently the gooshiest, most heartbreaking ones. Like this, from one of Dad’s letters to Mom in Vienna in 1967:

  Dear Patricia,

  Just a very short note to tell you that I love you very much and want to marry you when circumstances permit. Was up late last nite studying for hist. exam and then woke up at five for no reason at all and just wished that you were there so I could reach out and pull you close to me and kiss you…

  I did laundry in the sink and hung my clothesline between two chairs. I opened a window and pulled back the sheers to let the canal breezes aid the drying. A shaft of light fell on my queen-size canopy bed, casting a spotlight perfectly on my nonexistent companion. I popped a couple of Tylenol PM and fell asleep hugging the light and listening to the drip-drip-drip of my clothes on the Venetian terrazzo floor.

  While I’m complaining, I might as well bring out the lineup of other complainers.

  Arthur Frommer may have become a cultural phenomenon worthy of a place on a presidential commission by 1968, but with popularity comes disdain, and the critics had uncapped their poison pens. There were accusations that Frommer himself had changed, his concerns turning from helping others travel cheaply to focusing on his own bottom line, in the form of an expanding guidebook company; partnership with (and sponsorship by) SAS Airlines and later KLM Royal Dutch Airlines; Arthur Frommer hotels in Amsterdam and Copenhagen; and—ironically, for someone who built his burgeoning empire on the joys of independent travel—a package tour company. In Stanley Elkin’s 1972 profile in Harper’s, Frommer predicted that in the coming year, some fifty thousand Americans would go on his tours of Europe.

  Much of the backlash was driven by some observers’ sense that as the pied piper of low prices, he had created the beaten path, conjuring crowds, obliterating authenticity. Nora Ephron, in her 1967 New York Times profile of Frommer, accused his followers of borderline cultish adherence to his recommendations: “Today’s Frommerite carries his big red book like a banner, daring natives to cheat him, challenging fellow tourists to underspend him. He worries as much about losing his book as he does his passport.”

  It wasn’t just the multiplying masses that bothered Ephron and others. There was also the very tone and style of Frommer’s prose. “The writing, with few exceptions, is humorless, uninteresting and given to rhetorical questions and exclamation points,” wrote Ephron, and Elkin made a similar criticism: “exclamation points dagger the pages until they bleed.”

  There’s no denying that Frommer’s writing often blurs the line between enthusiasm and hyperbole, though humorless and uninteresting it is most certainly not. And if you consider the context, his enthusiasm and credulousness make sense; indeed, I’d wager they were entirely intentional. A book that’s intended to start a movement demands an infectious, populist voice. There’s no introductory paean to the joys and mind-opening wonders of travel; instead, Frommer’s very tone—he himself would later call it “young and naïve, full of purple prose, and overly awed by the pleasures of that continent”—achieves the same effect. It does what good writing is supposed to do: show, don’t tell. The exclamation points are the point.

  Inevitably, though, the freshness of Frommer’s voice and message had begun to fade; the cultural mood had shifted again.

  By the early 1970s, the baby boomers had come of age, and the European Grand Tour had become a rite of passage for many of them—so many as to become a cliché. The Continent was crowded, but with the wrong crowd; the backpacker’s quest for authenticity is always, always away from the other backpackers. With the counterculture movement in full flourish, the youthful travel trail now led to Asia.

  Just as Frommer had piggybacked on Fielding and Fodor, offering a new way to travel their territory, a new crop of travel guides built on Frommer’s methods, including Lonely Planet, Moon Guides, and Insight Guides, all of which began in the early 1970s. The upstart guidebooks pared down Frommer’s shoestring-budget approach even further and also applied it to other parts of the world.

  Some of the broader travel attitudes, the essential motivations for going abroad at all, shifted along with the backpacker routes. For Frommer and other travelers of the early and mid-twentieth century, travel was its own pursuit, its own end. You went to Paris to go to Paris; you went to Rome to go to Rome. There was nothing wrong with that, just as there was no shame in considering oneself a tourist. This was the foundation of the leisure-travel boom: it wasn’t about immigration or education or commerce or power but essentially aimless wanderlust.

  In the 1970s, though, as the mass-tourism backlash began and the ascendant counterculture movement started to become more mainstream, the pendulum began to swing in the other direction, a trend that has largely continued to this day. Among a certain portion of today’s travel cognoscenti, it is necessary to have some deeper motivation—to find one’s roots, to learn to make authentic Tuscan peasant cuisine, to escape the rat race and live the good life in Provence. A friend of mine, upon hearing that I was going to Paris, informed me that I should try to go the whole five days without ever seeing the Eiffel Tower, even for a moment, even as a speck on the horizon. In fact, in certain quarters, you’re deemed an Ugly American if you head to Paris rather than spending your trip trekking through the Alps, herding goats, or, even better, hitchhiking across Mongolia or hanging with Maoist rebels in some war-torn republic.

  But of course I went to the Eiffel Tower. Because the Eiffel Tower is cool. Just as the Hofbräuhaus or pretty much any oft-scoffed “tourist trap” is, in its own unique way, cool. Interesting. Worth the visit.

  They’re cool because of their intrinsic merits—symbols of ingenuity, invested with stories and showcases of a culture’s self-worth, once you begin to understand why anyone erected them in the first place. They’re also cool and intriguing specifically because they have, over time, acquired a totemic status in society—there’s a shared meaning that goes beyond the original stories and context. This is a wholly unoriginal observation, but to be a tourist is to be part of something collective—these places are the crossroads of the world for a reason. The crowds are not the drawback; they’re actually kind of the point.

  I have to say, though: in Venice, I sometimes had a hard time remembering that.

  A very hard time.

  At dinner the next night, I found another one of Frommer’s 1963 picks, this one on the Lista di Spagna, near the train station. I’d been trying to follow the advice in ED5 that you should always order from the prezzo fisso menu in Venice—but as far as I could tell, that was now an openly understood synonym for “half-assed tourist menu.” The same applied to any sign—in English—advertising “Typical Venetian Cuisine.” This restaurant had both, which should have b
een a warning. My lasagne bore the distinctive pockmarks of microwave reheating. They didn’t even bother to remove it from the Pyrex dish before serving it. As for the roast chicken, I strongly suspect it was neither roast nor chicken but one of the semidomesticated pigeons from the Piazza San Marco, boiled in fetid canal water.

  I was starting to think that if I wanted to improve my mood, I might need to start cheating on Arthur. After all, this was Italy. Why eat lousy food?

  I wondered if the information overload and crowd-sourcing of the Internet would be any better at guiding me to the good stuff. Perhaps it was time to test out those twenty-first-century tools I’d intentionally been shunning. So I went to an Internet café and put out a call on my blog, on Twitter, on Facebook. For one day—and one day only—I would rely on tips from the masses.

  Sorry, Arthur. Just a trial separation.

  Of course, it would take a few days for the tips to come in. By then, I would be in Rome. For now, I still had to get through Venice.

  Two more days.

  Nothing snowballs like unhappiness. Day three passed in a haze of frustration, playing out like a tourism blooper reel:

  Here were the gondoliers whistling “O sole mio,” that most famous of Venetian love songs (which is actually from Naples).

  Here was the Bridge of Sighs, the view toward it framed by massive billboards, on the surrounding buildings, for diamond jewelry.

  Here were the bridges and landmarks where, desperate for interaction, I did the Tourist Dance with anyone who would follow my lead. Here were my uncooperative dance partners, scowling and begrudgingly taking my photo, then turning on their heels and walking away.

  Ah, but now the scene changes. Here were the two radiant Indian women—drop-dead gorgeous, I kid you not—in copper-hued sundresses who approached me on the Accademia Bridge to initiate the Tourist Dance. Here they were, the tourist starlets, beaming as their handpicked paparazzo took their picture; here they were, laughing when I posed with Europe on Five Dollars a Day; here they were, peppering me with questions about my project, grinning in wonder when I told them about Le Grand Colbert in Paris.

  Ah, Venice. The canals. The grand architecture.

  The… billboards obscuring some of the most

  prominent views of said architecture.

  Here I was: triumphant! Because here were all my points about the joys of tourism coming together perfectly, as though scripted: Tourist Dance, Crossroads of the World, Diversity, Tourists Are Smart and Interesting, and There’s Plenty of Lingering Old World Magic—cut, perfect, fade to black, applause! Here I was, putting all my hard-won confidence and citizen-of-the-world savviness to good use by… droning on and on about how many countries I’d been to and all the profound things I’d learned and, God, all those tourists are ruining this city. Here were their smiles fading by about the third minute of my soliloquy, and here was me thinking, Oh, no. I have become everything I hate.

  Though they were typically upbeat, both my mother and Arthur Frommer also had the occasional lament about the ubiquity of their fellow tourists.

  Take Harry’s Bar in Venice, still one of the iconic touristic institutions of the city. Here’s what ED5 advises in the Readers’ Suggestions section:

  You should mention Harry’s Bar as a place to avoid like poison, unless you want to come to Venice to spend time in a cocktail lounge like any at home, hear screams of “how are you, dear?!” from all the rich American tourists (nobody but Americans seems to go there) and pay an outrageous price for a Tom Collins.

  I feared that a visit to Harry’s would finally push me past the brink of despair—I just might swan-dive into the path of a tour boat. I gave the Tom Collins a pass.

  I was also in good, grumpy company with, among others, one Virginia Woolf, who wrote to Vanessa Bell in 1913, “I’m glad to find that you dislike Venice because I thought it detestable when we were there, both times.”

  Venice is a muse, famously, but not a very creative one: people tend to say the same things about it, over and over. One particularly common sentiment: Venice as tragic heroine, Ophelia of the Adriatic, glamorous, mysterious, doomed, drowning.

  Some Venetians are sick of the hand-wringing and metaphor-slinging of outsiders: “The hackneyed image of Venice as a drowning city isn’t entirely accurate,” novelist Andrea di Robilant told the New York Times in 2006. “Lately, there’s been a resurgence, a great influx of artists, actors and creative people.” Carla, my majestic and melancholy host, likely would have agreed: Venice may have seen hard times, but don’t write that obituary yet. A city built on water is a city built on world-class stubbornness and determination; if they could do that, my God… surely some high water and a few more visitors won’t make them give up on this insane experiment of a town.

  But there’s no denying some essential truths: namely, that the increasingly alta water is threatening the city, and so, too, are the tourist masses. Some 20 million come here every year (most of them day-trippers). The vast, vast majority of them are heading to the centro storico, the historic city center, which is about one-twelfth the size of Manhattan. And they’re not spread out; they mostly come between April and October. Have I mentioned it’s crowded?

  The permanent population, meanwhile, is heading the other way. One hundred seventy thousand people called Venice home in 1951. In 1993: seventy-four thousand. In 2009, shortly after I was there, the population dropped below sixty thousand. To mark the occasion, Venice residents held a mock funeral, ferrying a hot-pink coffin down the Grand Canal.

  Back in the Piazza San Marco, I noticed that the temporary boardwalk above the flooded ground had become an attraction in its own right, a snapshot scene nearly as popular as the pigeons. I could only imagine how this photo would be described to the friends back home or online: “Check out this water! Look at what all those tourists are doing to this place! Terrible!”

  I joined the crowds seated on the boardwalk and pulled Europe on Five Dollars a Day from my bag, mildly tempted to chuck Frommer into the acqua alta. Around the piazza, string quintets and larger bands played in front of several sidewalk cafés. It was a humid afternoon, the air languid and uncomfortable, and all the people around me looked exhausted and addled from the heat, the walking, the eternal crowds.

  “Check it out—that’s what I need,” I heard an American-accented voice say. “Europe on Five Dollars a Day.” A group of four American college students—three women and one man—was sitting on the other side of the riser, looking at my book. I smiled weakly.

  “Kind of a joke. You can’t really do it,” I said. “Especially here.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” said the man. He had close-cropped hair, a black shirt, and a snide smirk. He said he was from Ohio. He filled a plastic cup with red wine and took a quick, pained gulp, like a child downing cough syrup. “Good thing we brought this with us on the train.” He held up the bottle for inspection. A bright orange sticker gave the price: six euros.

  “This is the only fun part of being in Venice,” one of his companions said. “Sitting here, drinking.” She took a swig from her cup. She was attired in what I was coming to think of as the uniform of young American women abroad: white skirt, loose black blouse, flip-flops. Trying to blend in among the Italians, but not quite succeeding, the footwear and slightly baggy cut of the clothes betraying the tourist truth. All four of the students had glazed, unsmiling expressions. I looked at their bottle, but it was only half empty. Either they’d already gone through another and discarded it or there was something else fueling their dour, unsteady manner.

  “How long are you here?” Ohio asked.

  “Four days,” I said.

  “That’s too long, bro. Way too long. One day is enough.”

  “Are you here for the semester?” I asked.

  “Heeelll no,” one of the women said. “Just here a couple of nights. Piled into a hostel room on the mainland, you know? It seemed like a fun idea…” Her voice trailed off.

  “I’m on the
late train back to Naples tonight,” Ohio said. Smirk. Swig. We were quiet for a moment. Finally he added ruefully, “This city is like that Disney place, with the pavilions for the different countries.”

  “Epcot?” one of the women asked.

  “Yeah. It’s like Epcot.”

  If there’s one especially common insult for the beaten path, it’s this one: it’s so Disney. At the mock funeral for the city, one of the mourners told the New York Times: “The real question is the future: will Venice become a Disneyland or no?” Actually, the Mouse has already made inroads: when I asked Carla how to get to an Internet café, the two major landmarks in her directions were the Rialto Bridge and the Disney Store.

  Here’s one solution: let Disney take over Venice for real. That’s what British economist John Kay suggested in 2006. The logic: If the city has effectively become a theme park, why not let the experts run it as such? Mickey Mouse as benevolent dictator will do a better job than the ineffectual hand-wringing that currently passes for a solution. Put up a visitors’ center. Make it easier for the day-trippers to get in, get their landmark snapshots, and get out. Charge a fee to enter. Put proceeds into building restoration and flood prevention. Kay’s proposal earned him the expected eye rolls and rebuttals but also five thousand euros from the Istituto Veneto for his “thought-provoking critique.”

  Kay’s suggestion dovetails with a broader and equally counterintuitive argument that goes like this: The most ethical way to travel is, in fact, on the beaten path. These places are already overrun; they can handle the visitors. So please don’t go beating new paths. An ecotourist lodge in the middle of an otherwise-untouched beach or jungle may do its best to educate visitors about the place and be light on the land, but many of these places would be better off left alone. Each new travel boom results not just in more tourists from more places venturing abroad, but also in more tourists from more places going to more new places.