“The Ego of the Traveler” writes Claudio Magris “is just something more than a glance, a hollow shell in which the form of reality is imprinted, a vessel that overflows with things.” Hence the enormous variety of landscapes that he traverses and decodes as if they are characters, from Madrid to Prague, Berlin and Warsaw, from Finland to Australia, from one sea to another, stopping in Trieste of course, in the city where a labyrinthine web of different eras is intricately woven and intertwined.

“The purpose of the journey,” clarifies Magris, “is the people.” To travel means “to confront History and its variations.” And this book constitutes precisely such an enjoyable confrontation, as it comes from a curious and erudite observer, ironic and magnanimous, a poet and at the same time a historian and philosopher.

Yet beyond the heterogeneous triggers that ignited these particular narratives, what mainly fascinates is their deeper coherence through which we recognize the basic themes and patterns of Magris’s work, his eternal and creative concerns.

“The status viatoris that the religious view ascribes to man also implies that fragility, that alternation of glory and downfall, the capacity for salvation that coexists with exposure to failure and error. There are places that enchant because they seem completely opposite, and others that fascinate because, from the very first time, they prove to be familiar, almost like a birthplace.

To know means often, in the Platonic sense, to recognize; it is the emergence of something possibly unknown until that moment, which you accept as familiar. To see a place, one needs to see it again. The known and the familiar, which you continuously discover and enrich, are the prerequisites of encounter, enchantment, and adventure; the twentieth or hundredth time you talk with a friend or make love with a loved one is infinitely more intense than the first.

The same applies to places; the most enchanting journey is a return, an odyssey, and the places of the usual route, the everyday microcosms you have traversed for years, are an odyssean challenge. “Why do you ride in these parts?” asks the officer to the marquis who walks next to him, in the famous ballad by Rilke. “To return,” he replies.

Claudio Magris