Why this blog?

I travel extensively around Europe - usually visiting Classical, i.e. Greek and Roman, sites and museums (well, I’m a Classical archaeologist and I mostly travel with my Classicist friend) but recently, due to my growing interest in modern history, and the turn of the 18th and 19th century in particular, I decided to make a possibly detailed tour of Napoleonic places in Europe and I was surprised that there was no thematic guidebook that could help me in planning itineraries (while I bought without problems for instance Roman France, archaeological guide to Greece, or Arthurian Britain). Therefore I keep gleaning data from the internet, period fora, general guidebooks and local information centres, I also take extensive notes and numerous photos when I go places, and I decided it may be nice to share it with other people interested in the period. I would love to compile one day a book from what I gather and learn myself.

As, however, this is a blog and not a book, it will be organized by tags and not chapters; I may also include some additional period or context info from time to time. The blog form also allows me to be open about not liking certain characters, so don’t expect me to write well about Josephine for instance, even though of course I feel obliged to include information about places and memorabilia related to her.

Since I would like this blog to provide help to other travellers, I will do my best to provide as much practical information (how to get there, GPS data, etc.) as possible, especially in case of places and curiosities off the beaten track.

This year saw my first trips on this new route, but I managed to cover a nice number of interesting places in Corsica, Elba, Northern Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic as well as in London, and in a month’s time I’m going to Paris, so there is already much to write about, and I’m also researching the opportunities given by my native Poland.

PS. Originally this blog was launched on Tumblr but I decided that much as that platform helps to promote content, it does not allow for comfortable tag browsing within the blog alone, and does not encourage discussion, so I decided to move the primary source to a more blogger-friendly platform and reblog every post to the original Tumblr location.