PLAYING AWAY
Roman Holidays and Other Mediterranean Encounters
Michael Mewshaw
New York: Atheneum, 1988
234 pp.; $18.95
A good modern-day travel writer is far more than someone whose major selling point is telling you which foreign hotels have American-sized ice cubes. To give a true look at a distant land's cultural footprints, the sophisticated travel writer must be something of a scholar, combining the skills of navigator, geologist, botanist, meteorologist, naturalist, mechanic, historian, cartographer, pharmacist, detective, novelist, snob, humorist, mimic, and stamp collector. In short, he needs a passing knowledge of just about everything.
Michael Mewshaw, a novelist and prize-winning investigative journalist, competently fills that role. For the past several years, he has written a monthly "Letter from Rome" in European Travel and Life magazine, describing his varied experiences. Now he has published his pieces in a charming collection titled Playing Away, a bemused American's look at life along the Mediterranean shoreline.
Mewshaw is a stylish writer and a deft anecdoteur. His discussions of everyday life, his often hilarious misencounters with Italians, and his description of the Tuscany countryside give the reader unfamiliar with Italy a vivid introduction to that country--and the old Italian hand, a sentimental journey through familiar haunts.
The peregrinations included in this volume include several that landed Mewshaw outside of his Italian home base. He visits Monte Carlo to examine the life of pro tennis players after they've left the court. He looks in on one of the bazaars of Marakech, Morocco. In El Oued, Algeria, he is told by natives he must see the Souf Museum. When he finally finds it, it is
No larger than a three-car garage … the bulk of the exhibit
… was an ambitious collection of venomous snakes the
size of earth-worms, intestinal worms the size of boa
constrictors, scorpions the size of ten-dollar lobsters,
horned beetles as big as Princess telephones, hairy
spiders, bristling lizards and bloodsucking centipedes.
Everyday Life
Most of Mewshaw's travel encounters will not leave his readers nearly as queasy as that. The heart of Mewshaw's book remains the Italy that enchanted him as a young man, especially Rome, the city he always returns to: "Say what you will about New York, Paris or London, for me nothing can compare to walking through Rome, particularly on clear evenings when the stones take on a warm, soft terra-cotta color."
Mewshaw is unusual among travel writers in that he describes everyday life in Italy as it really is--both the charming countryside and the raucous cacophony of the major cities. Reading his tales of being in Italy certainly brings out sympathy in
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