Patrick Leigh Fermor · 1977 · overland

Patrick Leigh Fermor's luminous 1977 memoir of the first leg of a journey he made as a teenager in 1933 and 34, walking the length of Europe from the Hook of Holland toward Constantinople. This volume carries him up the Rhine and down the Danube, through a Germany on the eve of catastrophe, to the edge of Hungary, sleeping rough or as the guest of peasants, students and barons. Written decades later from memory and recovered notebooks, it is among the finest of all travel books.

1. 1
   Hook of Holland

   On a snowy December day in 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor steps ashore at the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople on a few pounds a month.

2. 2
   Cologne

   Up the frozen Rhine through the Low Countries to Cologne and its great cathedral, sleeping in barns, workhouses and the spare rooms of strangers.

3. 3
   Mainz

   On past Bonn, Koblenz and Mainz, river castles thick above the vineyards, into a Germany only months into Nazi rule.

4. 4
   Heidelberg

   A snug welcome at the Red Ox inn in Heidelberg, first of the scholars and aristocrats who take the young vagabond in.

5. 5
   Ulm

   Across the Swabian hills to Ulm and the headwaters of the Danube, which he will now follow east.

6. 6
   Munich

   A detour to Munich and its cavernous, brawling beer halls, where he loses his diary and nearly his nerve.

7. 7
   Vienna

   Down the Danube to Vienna, where he sketches portraits door to door to earn his winter keep.

8. 8
   Bratislava

   Into Czechoslovakia and old Pressburg, now Bratislava, on the threshold of the Hungarian plain.

9. 9
   Esztergom

   And to the bridge across the Danube at the Hungarian border, where this first volume leaves him in mid-stride.