Coryate's Crudities

This is the first edition since 1905 of the first British travelbook by the 17th-century cult figure Thomas Coryate, who went on foot to Venice and back.

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Travelogue of the seventeenth-century backpacker whose journey to Italy kick-started Britain's taste for European travel. Thomas Coryate's cult backpacking tour of seventeenth-century Europe has been a continuous source of inspiration for travellers, most recently Tim Moore who traced his footsteps in Continental Drifter (Abacus 2001). Exposing Coryate as the first gay culture vulture, Moore enjoys Coryate's opinionated interest in local methods of execution, art, devastation wreaked by raging continental civil wars, or in picking a religious fight. Coryate's Crudities are the travelogue of the first backpacker roughing it in Europe, offering a priceless insight into the character of the French, Italians, British, and not least of all his own.