Buried Italy Series - Myth And Sea: An Odyssey Through Italy And Greece
Come and follow the oldest sea-story ever told, along the very coasts where the ancients swore it happened. The Greeks and Romans did not treat the Odyssey as fiction — they pinned its every episode to a real cove, headland, or lake you can still stand on today, and for three thousand years travelers have come to see them. Over eleven unforgettable days we trace the mythic route of Odysseus — Ulysses, as the Romans called him — by coach, by boat, and at last across the sea by air — from the enchanted headland of the sorceress Circe, to the cliffs where the man-eating Laestrygonians hurled down their boulders, past the crater lake the Romans called the doorway to the underworld, and finally over the water to the green Ionian kingdom the hero spent ten years trying to reach. Everywhere, the great theme of our journey: the tension between what is myth and what is startlingly, verifiably real. The Mycenaeans truly traded on these shores five centuries before Homer sang; the earliest Greek writing in the West jokes about a golden cup from the Iliad; a Roman emperor carved the whole Odyssey in marble inside his private seaside grotto. And we will taste it all — Roman wine and olive oil in the volcanic hills, Lacryma Christi in the shadow of Vesuvius, true Neapolitan pizza in the city that invented it, and cool Robola poured on a Kefalonian terrace as the sun sinks into Odysseus's own sea. We will even put our own hands in the clay, shaping vessels the way the first Mycenaeans and Greeks once did. This is a journey that begins in the Eternal City and ends in the homeland of the world's most famous traveler — myth and sea, made whole. And, as always, expect a few surprises along the way.
