‘Paris is a Nasty City’ and Other Classic Travel Insults

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  08.27.07 | 2:08 PM ET

imageThe San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn offered up his favorite critiques and insults of various places from a range of writers on Sunday. A sampling: “The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.”—Paul Theroux; “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”—Georges Clemenceau; and “In England there are 60 different religions but only one sauce.”—Voltaire. It was D.H. Lawrence who suggested Paris was nasty. This photo notwithstanding, we respectfully disagree.

Photo by gillesklein via Flickr, (Creative Commons).