True Stories in Italy, and Friendly Voices on the Road

ITALY, TRUE STORIES OF LIFE ON THE ROAD edited by Anne Colcagno (Traveler’s Tales Inc., $17.95, paper).

OK, OK. Traveler’s Tales is cranking out these collections as relentlessly as the airlines are cooking up dubious frequent-flier partnerships (“Get 6 miles for every turnip purchased with a phone card!”).

I’m a sucker for them. Why?

Because these anthologies do what guidebooks and single-author travelogues can’t: investigate a place (Thailand, Mexico, India, France, Spain, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Paris, Brazil, Nepal) or type of traveler (“Gutsy Mamas,” “Women in the Wild”) from a spectrum of idiosyncratic perspectives, most of them reasonably intelligent.

Want to understand Italy? Pay attention to writer Thom Elkjer’s struggle to get an Italian fishing license. Contrasting the warmth of the people with the societal penchant for brain-crippling bureaucracy, he concludes that family bonds allow Italians to use the former to cut through the latter.

Listen to how lines from very different pieces blend into a glimpse of the whole: “This afternoon Venice smells like laundry.” . . . “To get to Pollino you have to take dusty stone roads that wind through deserted foothills.” . . . “By the time we limped into sight of the stone walls of Citta di Castello, I felt awed by the tenacity of the weeds that stain and flavor everything in the Italian countryside.” . . . “Some students of the Odyssey say that Favignana was the home of Circe, the enchantress who turned Odysseus’ men into swine and held them captive for a year.”

The editors are sufficiently iconoclastic that there’s something in each volume guaranteed to set off someone’s vulgarity meter.

Here we have the American mother who poses nude in Rome for students from a Texas Christian college, and an essay on Moana, a popular porn star who receives secular beatification after she dies and is cremated. “There is something rather grand about this pitiless disposal of the body that brought her fame,” offers contributor Andrea Lee.

As Jan Morris writes in her introduction: “The thing about Italy is that, in reputation as in landscape, in the past as in the present, in the idea of it and in the hard fact, it is never dull.”

*

RADIO ON THE ROAD--The Traveler’s Companion by William Hutchings (Arrowhead Publishing, $14.95, paper).

The Alaska-Canada Highway. Late September. Late at night. We pass through another otherworldly construction site where Godzilla-size machines work under huge spotlights. At a remote cafe, a man with lunatic eyes opens a takeout coffee cup to show us an enraged beetle the size of a dwarf kitten. Cackling ominously, he says he’s never seen anything like it. Ever. Back on the road in the middle of nowhere, we click on the radio. Screech . . . Squawk . . . Hiss . . . And then . . . NOOOOOOOO! Once again, all we can get is Art Bell, talking eerily about “the quickening” and odd happenings at Area 51.

Every road-trip traveler has longed for a familiar tune or voice to cut through the lonely night or boring freeway miles. This book lists 15,000 AM and FM stations, including 600 National Public Radio stations. A fine resource for helping travelers find--or avoid--Barry Manilow and Mozart, not to mention Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan, Don Imus, Dr. Dean Edell and all the other talk hosts who have somehow yakked their way into the American psyche.

Quick trips

THE GREAT TOWNS OF AMERICA--A Guide to the 100 Best Getaways for a Vacation or a Lifetime by David Vokac (West Press, $18.95, paper).

“Great,” in this author’s book, means “scenic appeal and memorable leisure-time features--natural and/or cultural attractions, restaurants and lodgings.”

The choices are solid if predictable: from Ojai, Calif., to Key West, Fla.; Taos, N.M., to Kennebunkport, Maine. The listings for restaurants, attractions, etc., are standard issue.

*

THE 100 BEST SMALL ART TOWNS IN AMERICA by John Villani (John Muir Publications, $16.95, paper).

“In a small art town gallery,” the author writes, “people don’t have to contend with the absurdly comic snobbery of buzz-cut, bleached, pierced- and black-jacketed gallery owners hiding behind paper-thin shields of elitist affectation.”

Yeah, but SoHo patrons seldom bicker with artistes named Moonbliss over the relative merits of stuffed frogs dressed as skiers versus tie-dyed God’s-eye mandalas. Still, this book has enough useful information--”hangouts,” “art events,” “arts scene”--to be treasured by peripatetic culture vultures.

*

HANS HOLZER’S TRAVEL GUIDE TO HAUNTED HOUSES by Hans Holzer (Black Dog and Levinthal, $9.95, hardcover).

Even if the notion of a “practical guidebook” written by a “renowned parapsychologist” strikes you as oxymoronic to the max, you may get a kick out of this.

Everyone figures there will be ghost stories floating about the Amityville Horror House in New York. But who’d of thunk that Minneapolis’ modern Guthrie Theater would be home to the spirit of a former usher who committed suicide? Holzer says it is, and he writes with mystifying authority. For instance: “In terms of physics, ghosts are electromagnetic fields originally encased in an outer layer called the physical body.”

Books to Go appears on the second and fourth Sundays of the month.