‘A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill.’
Ryszard Kapuściński: Travels with Herodotus
For years I have gone looking for Eden, parts of the planet where the world has changed little since the dawn of human life. Over time those areas have shrunk: uncontaminated nature became sequestered into clusters of land, increasingly encircled by “civilisation”. Without even noticing it, I switched my attention to those parts of the world where local conditions are so harsh that the land is left alone or in the back alleys of civilisation.
Wanderlust is perhaps a desirable illness in the post-industrial era. In our consciousness, a background noise remains, telling us that the humanly manipulated world is fragile, ephemeral, and ultimately false. That is why finding the strength to leave the things we find comfortable and go far beyond our castle is so important.
The journey may shed light on our nature and help us to reposition ourselves in the cosmos, the natural world and among our peers.
Far Beyond the Castle is a different travel book. It is a collection of stories on five continents that explores adventure travel from different angles: the insights about human nature we might discover in remote lands, among remote peoples; the beauty of unmodified nature; our rationale for being a species apart; the emotions that are prompted by what we experience.
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Paolo has been travelling ‘extensively, and with a strong preference for uncomfortable places’ since the age of sixteen, and then writing about it. He has lived and worked in Brazil, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, the United States, and Asia. He received a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Roehampton, London, and has published two books in Italian: La solitudine di Ulisse (1999) and Passages (2002). Far Beyond the Castle is his first collection of travel stories in English and will be followed by a collection of short fiction based on his encounters. He lives in London.
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