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

by Douglas S. Mack

  In his 1972 Harper’s profile, Stanley Elkin credited—well, blamed—Arthur Frommer for inventing the notion of “Europe for everybody”; by the 1970s, though, that was spreading to “Asia for everybody, too.” Today it’s more like “everything and everywhere for everyone—and not just to see those places but to feel them in some mystical way.”

  As much as I like the notion that travel is becoming more egalitarian, I can’t help but recoil at the perception that it’s everyone’s birthright to see everything, do everything. It’s manifest destiny for the masses, this sense of laying a personal claim to a culture or place before other outsiders “spoil” it.

  In a sense, Venice and other cities on the beaten path play the same role that Oktoberfest plays in Munich, but on a broader scale. They keep the invading masses concentrated in specific places—places that are accustomed to tourists and have the wherewithal to deal with them. Personally, I think there’s still value to seeing these places, hearing these languages, eating these foods, experiencing these cultures in their original and ever-evolving context—please don’t just go to Epcot or Las Vegas and call it good. But is staying here on the beaten path, trampling it to death, still more ethical than blazing previously uncharted paths and making them the new Venice? I fear the answer is yes.

  My last night, I finally figured out my cure. You’re going to do this, I told myself. You’re going to get over this dark mood. Stop moping. Be a tourist, not a traveler. I recalled Frommer’s lyrical scene-setting at the start of his Venice chapter:

  At the foot of the Venice railway station, there is a landing from which a city launch embarks for the trip up the Grand Canal. As you chug along, little clusters of candy-striped mooring poles emerge from the dark; a gondola approaches with a lighted lantern hung from its prow; the reflection of a slate-gray church, bathed in a blue spotlight, shimmers in the water as you pass by.

  I hatched a simple plan for happiness: find that scene.

  I walked to the big gondola station by the Hard Rock Cafe. Nothing. No lanterns. In fact, there were no gondoliers at all.

  I kept going. To the Accademia Bridge. Still nothing. Rialto Bridge. Nope. I strode quickly, confidently, never lost, always purposeful: find a damn lantern-lit gondola. Finally, to the train station, where Frommer had told me to go all along. I could hear him scolding me for grumbling at him earlier, and reminding me, with a sage chuckle, to just trust me, trust me.

  So here I was, at the train station, scanning the canals, staring hard past the Scalzi Bridge, looking for a lantern, but lowering my standards with each passing moment. Any floating point of light would do. Hell, I thought, I’d even settle for a claptrap of a boat paddled by a gondolier sending a text message.

  Niente.

  I skulked back across the bridge. To my haven, the one place where I could be happy, or at least agreeably melancholy. I wearily nodded at the worn stone man as I passed beneath him.

  I kicked off my shoes and sank into a chair, closing my eyes and letting the lapping water outside the window soothe me. Come on, water: hurry up with the calming. Hurry up with the enlightenment and the love. A distant pulsing noise formed the bass line below the lapping. Muffled yells joined the chorus. This was not what I had in mind.

  The pulse became a roar; the voices became bellows of Dionysian delight. A party boat passed by my window—and the canal was just fifteen or twenty feet wide, so when I say “just outside,” I mean that I could have reached out and smacked one of the revelers. It was awfully tempting.

  My last bastion: officially ruined. A minute later, the boat went by again in the other direction. And this time, the loud, drunken revelers were singing—ruining—one of my favorite songs of all time. “Volare.” Gipsy Kings.

  Charm capital of the world, my tourist ass, I grumbled to myself. Get me out of here already.

  Words I never thought I’d say: I kind of missed my nine-to-five grind back home.

  Rome

  Eternal City of Tourism

  Whenever 6 p.m. approached last summer, Hope and I

  felt a genuine urge to rush back to the [Hotel] “Texas,”

  to hear the exciting conversation that fills the cocktail-

  lounge of the pension (our fellow guests, among others:

  a member of the Minneapolis Philharmonic, and

  his wife; a professor from the Free China

  University on [sic] Formosa).

  —Europe on Five Dollars a Day

  There’s nothing like having your life flash in front of your eyes to reboot your spirit and remove any sense of jadedness. I was happy to be away from the City of Canals, but had forgotten one of its few perks: a refreshing lack of cars. I had become accustomed to walking straight down the middle of every road without a single cautionary glance. I left Rome’s Termini Station, bouncing in jubilation—I’m not in Venice anymore!—and into traffic.

  Beeeeeep!! A Fiat scorched past me. A millimeter closer and I would now be known as the Noseless Wonder.

  Braaaap!! A tour bus took a corner on two wheels and gunned for me.

  I scrambled back to the curb. Oh, right. They have cars here. Famously. Ubiquitously. Dementedly. I waited for a gap and then made a run for it, crossing in furtive bursts and getting religion for perhaps the first time in my life, wondering who the patron saint of pedestrians might be.

  Perhaps the nuns on the other side of the street knew. They stared at me as I caught my breath. They looked every bit as overwhelmed as I was by the automotive mayhem. Another “Oh, right” moment: this is the cradle of Catholicism, where the nuns are tourists and the tourists overrun the holy sites, worshipping with their flashbulbs and seeking the holy trinity: meaning, happiness, gelato.

  I felt like a panicked, ignorant, amazed tourist again, no longer weary but invigorated—I was out of my element and therefore, in a strange way, entirely back in it. I practically skipped all the way to my hotel.

  A few words about the Pensione Texas, courtesy of Arthur Frommer circa 1963:

  The Big Splurge: A bright, young Italian named Guido Agnolucci, and an American named Marvin Hare, teamed up three years ago to open a pensione in Rome that would cater to the thoughtful tourist—people anxious to absorb the highest cultural lessons of the city. To give their establishment a name no one would ever forget, they called it the Pensione Texas. You’ll realize how perfectly inappropriate that moniker is when you enter this glamorously-decorated, duplex apartment.

  Pensione Texas occupies the fourth and fifth floors of a historic but nondescript building. Walking by, you might guess it was apartments or offices or, more likely, you wouldn’t notice it at all. The downstairs restaurant is now Chinese. The elevator—an elaborate wrought-iron cage of the “they don’t make ’em like they used to” variety—was out of order, so I took the stairs.

  After finishing the check-in formalities, I pulled out my book and showed the above passage to the desk clerk, Dario, a tall, middle-aged man with a long face framed by dark curls of hair. Like my Venetian host, Carla, he wore a perpetually wistful expression on his face, as though forever recalling some long-lost, bittersweet memory. It grew more pronounced as he examined the book.

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember this.”

  Fireworks went off in my brain. Wait, really? Finally! The words I’d been waiting for! After all these weeks, I’d become accustomed to blank looks or, worse, concerned stares from people trying to figure out if I was the dangerous or the benign kind of crazy.

  But Dario understood. Dario remembered.

  “We were in many books,” he continued. “And the New York Times. Esquire. The president of the Diners Club credit card came here with his wife and two children. Elizabeth Taylor—do you know Elizabeth Taylor?”

  I did.

  “She stayed here. She was at another hotel, more famous, but they all found out and were bothering her, the… press, the…”

  “The paparazzi? She came here to hide from the paparazzi?”

  “
Exactly.”

  “Elizabeth Taylor?” I said, slightly stunned. “Stayed here?”

  “Exactly. With Richard Burton.”

  He held up a finger, remembering something. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a brochure from the 1960s. “I show people this sometimes, so they can see what it was like.”

  The brochure was a treasure of midcentury graphic design, all clean fonts and glorious Technicolor photos. The scenes followed suit: grand to the point of borderline camp, rooms overstuffed with rococo furnishings and enormous artwork, the textiles and surfaces a cornucopia of textures and patterns. The photo on the back of the brochure was especially stunning: a room with black-and-white checkerboard flooring, one wall painted cardinal red, two others covered with a wallpaper of interlocking swirls, and in the center of it all, a matching set of two chairs and a sofa, all whiter than white and squat but hulking and very, very mod.

  Double take: I looked at the room we were in—same size, same door openings, same inset arched shelves. Had to be the same space. But now the surfaces were drab, the furnishings a few simple wooden tables and chairs. The aesthetic had gone from Liberace to library.

  Dario pointed out more praise listed in the brochure: there was the quote from Europe on Five Dollars a Day, right at the top. And Fielding’s Guide to Europe (“Texas sized values at Rhode Island prices… What martinis!”). Holiday magazine. The Los Angeles Times. Dollar Wise Guide to Italy. Rome Daily American. Esquire. The general sentiment was that this pensione was glamorous but inexpensive, with, as Frommer had noted, an eclectic clientele. Esquire added: “One’s table companions range from a British nobleman to a Brooklyn cab-driver, such is the range of personalities who come to content themselves before the homey hearth.”

  “May I take a photo of this?” I asked, pointing to the brochure.

  Dario shrugged. “You may have it, if you like.”

  “I… are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course. I rarely show it to people anymore—I don’t think it would be right to distribute it. The rooms…” He paused and looked down, a far-off glimmer in his eyes. “The rooms no longer look like they once did.”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly and then looked back to meet my captivated gaze. Smiling, he handed me the brochure. I held it gingerly.

  “Ah, but I’m sorry for going on. I will show you to your room.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m happy to hear the stories. I’d love to hear more.” I was digging my notebook out of my pocket, frantic to start writing this all down.

  But Dario was already striding down the hall, key in hand.

  “Your room has a bathroom,” he said. He opened the door to reveal a small space, decorated in the same manner as the lobby, spare but homey, with a twin bed tight up against one wall. “This is why Elizabeth Taylor came here—it was one of the only hotels where some rooms had private baths. Now everyone has them.”

  “Really, I’d love to hear more about all of that,” I said, trying not to beg.

  “Yes, of course,” Dario said. He turned and headed back to the lobby, leaving me mystified for now. But it was a good confusion. My glee and energy were replenishing. I was a happy tourist.

  The evolution of private bathrooms is a telling detail. These were one of the amenities that Arthur Frommer typically viewed as superfluous and decidedly not budget-traveler friendly. He says it right up front, in the Rules of the Game chapter at the start of Europe on Five Dollars a Day: “Rule 1 of your European travels is, therefore, never to ask for a private bath with your hotel room. It is impossible to travel cheaply in Europe otherwise.” He lists no Rule 2.

  European hotel owners could be forgiven for thinking the American tourists were sending mixed messages—it was only a few years earlier that the Marshall Planners had been encouraging them to install private bathrooms, to attract the tourists of Fielding’s and Fodors’s ilk. (It’s a reasonable guess that the owners of the Pensione Texas, which opened in the mid-1950s and catered to Americans, knowingly heeded this advice.) Frommer ushered in a new type of traveler, one of aspirational thriftiness, replacing conspicuous consumption with conspicuous cost-cutting.

  Private baths represent one area where Frommer’s legacy has not endured—witness Dario’s comments that this amenity was no longer notable or the fact that of the few recently built hostels I stayed in, most had not only private rooms (not the rowdy, bunk-filled quarters that the term “hostel” often conjures) but private baths. And I have to say: this is one aspect of modernity for which I am exceedingly grateful.

  “It’s so cool,” my mother told me when I first started interrogating her about her trip. “There’s stuff everywhere in Rome: the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain—and, oh, look, the Spanish Steps!”

  The place she remembers most clearly, though, is a restaurant. She couldn’t recall its name or where it was, but the meal was indelible: “We’re sitting there eating lunch, and this little girl walks up—three, maybe four years old. The owner’s daughter. She’s holding something in her hands, and we think, ‘Oh, that’s nice, she has a gift for us.’ She’s grinning. And then she opens her hands”—I’ve heard this story many times, and Mom always leans forward at this point, making eye contact before the kicker catapults from her mouth—“and it’s a bird! A dead bird! A very dead starling!”

  I was a bit on guard as I ate my dinner that first night under a grapevine-covered arbor at an outdoor café. But I relaxed as I sipped my second glass of wine and tucked into a plate of ravioli far better than anything I’d had in Venice. An accordion moaned softly from the shadows, its player unseen. And despite my fears, there were no children bearing unwanted corpses. (Thankfully, I missed out on the dead birds altogether in Rome.)

  The other stuff, though—the cool stuff, the historic stuff—was still ever present and ever impressive. Rome really does have more than its fair share of historic bounties, and you really do just sort of stumble on one after another: Whoa, there’s the Colosseum! And right next door, isn’t that… yep, that’s the Roman Forum! Walking around Rome was like an inadvertent scavenger hunt with genuinely epic treasures at each turn. Oh, hey, the Pantheon. Well, since I’m here… And then, a few minutes later, I spotted a sign for the Trevi Fountain. All right then, I thought. Don’t mind if I do.

  It was getting late by now, approaching midnight, but the area around the fountain was packed with giddy gawkers from all over the world: Russians over here, Koreans over there, a church group from Kentucky a few feet away. Perhaps a hundred people total. The Trevi Fountain’s beauty is a grandiose variety, not the fragile, tragic kind I’d found in Venice—this is vigor and might and potency; it wants, demands some fellow revelers. There was even dancing—the Tourist Dance, of course, with the added step of an over-the-shoulder coin toss for the camera, in keeping with the tradition that said coin toss will ensure a return trip to Rome. (The coins add up to an estimated three thousand euros every day.) I joined in, getting my own photo. Veni, vidi, proieci: I came, I saw, I tossed.

  The various groups were intermingling casually like a cocktail party gone right. If anything, the tourist crowds enhanced the spectacle of the fountain and its marble figurines, creating a festive air. I took a Not-So-Flattering Photo of the scene, noting to myself that, really, the surrounding spectacle was every bit as alluring as the grand fountain itself. Every landmark and street scene I’d stumbled upon in Rome had been like that, each one buzzing with a lively mix of locals and tourists, of sweeping history and the messy, quirky present.

  This was my kind of city.

  The next morning, the time had come for the breakup with Arthur Frommer, my Roman Holiday from the old guidebook and my brief experiment in modern-day crowd-sourcing.

  It’s worth noting that even when I was relying on Europe on Five Dollars a Day, I was still crowd-sourcing, albeit using the crowds of the 1960s. The Readers’ Suggestions sections that Frommer included throughout the book were effectively the same thing as modern-day blog co
mments or reviews on travel websites like TripAdvisor. Then as now, the comments ranged from truly insightful and practical to self-serving, questionable, and downright spammy. By the mid-1980s, Frommer had become so exasperated by the number of duplicitous recommendations he was receiving that he dropped the Readers’ Suggestions section altogether.

  Most of the dozen or so suggestions I received through my blog and online social networks came from friends or friends of friends, so I trusted there wasn’t any underhanded manipulation going on. My bigger worry was that a large portion of the recommendations would just be total duds, well-intentioned but not well-informed, based on hearsay, speculation, or hazy memories heavily filtered by nostalgia. I wasn’t sure whom to trust, or who would be offended if I didn’t like—or worse, even try—their generously offered recommendations. So I selected based on random whim and gut reaction, supplemented by some quick research on user-generated websites like TripAdvisor.

  As I stood outside my first Internet-selected stop of the day, I looked at the signs by the door. This was one of the top-rated gelaterias in Rome on TripAdvisor, but apparently the guidebooks shared the love, judging by the laminated, blown-up pages from Lonely Planet and others. The shop was a tiny place called Gelateria del Teatro, on a dead-end nook of a street near the Piazza Navona. It sure didn’t look like much worth mentioning—no long line, no fancy interior. I got a scoop of the torta al limon (lemon pie) and a scoop of chocolate with wine, the swirled flavors packing a one-two, upper-downer, bright-heady punch. It was glorious.