The Liquid Continent: Travels Through Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul (Armchair Traveller)

"A beautifully written trilogy."—Wanderlust

Published to critical acclaim in 2008, Nicholas Woodsworth's Mediterranean Trilogy, released originally in three volumes, is now available in a single paperback edition. Combining travel narrative, history, and reflection on contemporary Mediterranean life, Woodsworth finds an intimacy, a garrulous warmth, and a near-tribal sociability that belongs uniquely to the cities on the fringe of this sea. It is neither African, nor European, nor Middle Eastern, but it is identifiable; it is Mediterranean. This sea, he argues, should not be seen as an empty space surrounded by Europe, Asia, and Africa, but as a single entity, a place from whose coastlines people look not outward, to this country or that capital, but inward, over the water to each other. The sea, Woodsworth tells us, has its own cities, its own life, its own way of being.

Woodsworth sets out from Alexandria, discovers the intimacies of Venice rarely witnessed by those on the tourist trail, and then, through Albania and toward the Aegean archipelago, arrives at Istanbul, where he installs himself in a former Benedictine monastery overlooking the Golden Horn. In all these places he finds traces of an older, more sophisticated existence and asks what these cities and their inhabitants owe to the sea.

Nicholas Woodsworth was born in Ottawa, Canada. He was the Africa correspondent of the Financial Times and is the author of Seeking Provence (Haus Publishing, 2008).