Tony Perrottet on the Intersection of Travel and History

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 01.26.07 | 11:40 AM ET

Author Tony Perrottet knows a thing or two about travel and history. His books include Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists. His World Hum story The Joy of Steam is featured in this year’s The Best American Travel Writing anthology. Now, he’s planning to teach an intriguing, unconventional new course about the intersection of writing, travel and history. It’s called The Past on the Page: Bringing History to Life, and it begins March 1 at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. To learn more, I e-mailed Perrottet to ask a few questions. He wrote back today from Tortola, of all places, where he had gone “to thaw out.”

World Hum: Did you dream up this course? If so, what inspired it?

Tony Perrottet: I went into NYU looking to teach a straight travel course. They had quite a few people already doing that, but they looked at my books and asked if I wanted to do something more original, with a historical bent. So I came up with this course—which was natural, since it explains exactly what I do!

You’ve made a career out of combining history and travel in your writing. Did your interest in history inspire your travels? Or vice versa? And how do you see the relationship between the two?

I guess I read a lot about history when I was growing up in Sydney, and that inspired my initial travels, although they were remote colonial frontiers in India and South America rather than the hallowed sites of Europe. But I’ve never really separated my travel and history writing—I think that the past really comes alive when you go to the places where events occurred, and there are often continuities that we might never guess. On another level, I actually approach historical research much the same way I approach a journey—I’ve landed (imaginatively) in a strange world, where certain things are easy to understand and others very strange. Where do you sleep? What do you eat? What are the bars like? These are good places to start anywhere…Today, I like the interplay of the past and present, and I’m attracted to places that have mythic historical images—ancient Rome, Tierra del Fuego, the Old West, revolutionary France, Zanzibar… (and of course the ancient baths of Istanbul).

What do you hope the students will take away from this course?

They’ll learn how to look at any period in the past and bring it to life in their writing—each class will use a theme as a springboard, drawn from our own culture’s obsessions (sex, celebrity, real estate, drugs etc…) that will give a surprising new angle on history, and remind us that characters in the past were once living, breathing people just like us. Hopefully, students will gain a fresh view of history, and their travel writing will gain a new dimension. The course is going to be a lot of fun (we’ll discuss the Hollywood movies and TV shows that have created our most potent images of the past, maybe go to the Frick mansion in New York or a restaurant that cooks up ancient Roman dishes) and also very practical (getting our writing out into the marketplace is a crucial element—I’ll talk about magazine and book proposals, dealing with editors, and all the paraphernalia of the publishing industry…)

Sounds great. Thanks, Tony.

Photo courtesy of Tony Perrottet.

Tags: Life of a Travel Writer