Books
We at the ArtExchange have over the years put together a lending library with travel books on Greece that are available to our participants to borrow and read during any of our journeys. Travel literature is a growing business, but relatively few literary travel books are published about Greece. We have been diligently combing book stores and book review supplements to add to our collection. From time to time we'll be letting you on our favourites. If you have one, you might want to share it with us by dropping us a line!
The most favourite of all to date has been Patricia Storace's book Dinner with Persephone (1997), a book that lets us in on the secrets of daily life in contemporary Greece, a Greece that is continually struggling to make sense of its past.
Storace, a poet and a travel writer, spent a year living in Athens and traveling around Greece to places that are visited by most - and to others that only an "insider" may let a foreigner in. A visitor, especially one that likes to take the roads less traveled cannot ask for a better guide than Storace. Describing her neighborhood, and the contradictions that define and give character to the "non-packaged" Greece is her line: "I live at the intersection of a street named after a famous courtesan Fryni and a Christian saint, Agios Fanourios".. and it gets better as the book unfolds in small, precise, and expertly worded chapters. Everyone can enjoy her description of hanging laundry on the tiniest balconies, or the habit of Greeks to ask personal questions such as "how much" one has paid for rent, shoes and any other query, but only those who have lived in one of these same apartments can appreciate the helpfulness of same co-residents when one needs help, any help.
It is a book that one cannot put down until it is all read. And once read, it becomes the best traveling companion to enter the heart and soul of Greece now.
